Frestonia - The Documentary! The Art Studios!
Hot Stuff Studio
1. North Kensington
The Garage, 22c Stable Way, W10 6QX
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June 29th, 2-10pm, Open Art Studio, buy art from artists. 7pm, Film Screening: The Republic of Frestonia, fundraiser for Hot Stuff Studio. .If impossible rents, inhumane housing policies & insufficient social funding sound familiar, let us take you back to where the revolution started: The Free Independent Republic of Frestonia, founded in 1977, when the clash, dub reggae and artists illuminated one of the poorest parts of London.
When:
2-10pm
Admission
June 29th, 2-10pm Open Art Studio
in 2023, Paprika Skala-Williams, an acclaimed ceramicist & Grenfell art-activist, had the idea to create a new community art studio space in a former car garage in Frestonia. The area is undergoing regeneration, with high end fashion businesses replacing affordable housing, and Paprika was determined to make sure that the local community would not lose out. The studio in the garage has a "Community Kiln", art residency spaces, space for music making, film screenings and a large outdoor "ecology" space dedicatd to helping regreen the area.
June 29th, 7pm - Screening of Republic of Frestonia (dir/prod. Robb Kerr, 10mins, UK)
Freedom for Frestonia: the London commune that cut loose from the UK
(The Guardian)
In the 1970's, Frestonia - the area around Freston Rd., was a mixture of young families, industrious bohemians – who included jewellery makers, car mechanics and one resident who made beautiful lutes – and people who evidently saw squatting as a means of doing nothing much at all. Rumours of imminent eviction would frequently fly around. And in the autumn of 1977, things got serious. At that point, the Greater London Council (the capital-wide authority abolished by Margaret Thacher’s government in 1986) served notice that the houses were to be demolished, the first part of a plan to turn the area into an industrial estate.
By this time, the squatters’ community included Nicholas Albery, an energetic product of 1960s hippiedom. Having organised a screening of the classic Ealing comedy Passport to Pimlico – in which the titular London neighbourhood declares independence from the UK – he suggested that the people in the GLC’s sights should do the same, an idea he had devised in collaboration with another hippie activist called Nicholas Saunders, and the poet Heathcote Williams.
In tribute to Freston Road, the new republic was to be called the Free and Independent Republic of Frestonia. It ceremonially seceded from the rest of the country on 31 October 1977, and appealed to the United Nations for help. The new nation had its own council of ministers, as well as its own stamps – which, whe
Free