What do we think of when we think of luxury? A Walthamstow cafe that does magic with salvaged surplus food profoundly answers the question
As one of the co-founders of the post-XR democracy project Trust The People, and a strategist for Flatpack parties in local elections, Greg Frey has been one of AG’s favourite creative activists for a while. We’re delighted to discover his Substack site, Notes From The Belly of the Whale, and particularly happy to cross-post his latest, beautifully-written blog below, on the question of communal luxury (by means of a high street in Walthamstow):
Greg Frey:
On Hoe Street, just above where it meets Lea Bridge Road, on the boundary between Leyton and Walthamstow, a low-slung beamer revs loud in a small gap of traffic, the estate agent swaps out their display board as prices rise for the thousandth month in a row, Hi-Klas Fashion sells £3 leggings from Bangladesh, and the Gleaners Cafe makes exquisite lunches, for whatever price people can afford, made from salvaged surplus food.
The hubbub prompts the question: what do we think of when we think of ‘luxury’?
It seems obvious—benign even—but beneath luxury lies some keys to making sense of this age of contradictions. And this part of London has a history of interrogating it.
Nearly 200 years ago, just up the road, William Morris was born. A master of crafting, later in his life Morris began to seriously question the version of luxury modelled by the victorian elite.
To begin with? That only a tiny handful of wealthy elites were allowed access to beauty, which left a bitterer and bitterer taste. Art, Morris says in his essay ‘The Socialist Ideal’, is “a necessity of human life which society has no right to withhold from any one of its citizens.” Either life’s beautiful things are available to everyone or they are not beautiful.
Delving deeper, Morris and his comrades realised that they needed more than a crude redistribution of the world’s nice things from rich to poor. The luxury of the victorian elite, in fact, was not a luxury worth having. This was because, as a class, they were so detached from how their ornate furnishings and opulent decor were made that they were effectively trapped in what Oscar Wilde (a good friend of Morris) would later come to call the ‘age of surfaces’.
Something else was possible, something where the poor would be free from “shoddy”, flimsy consumables, and the rich would be free from wasteful and boring games of display. In Morris’s alternative vision of society, everyone would be reconnected with the ability to make beautiful things, beauty would be reconnected with the way objects are used, and art would be re-welded to life.
In this vision you can see the foundations of a transformative politics, one that sees the harm so-called ‘luxury’ brings upon everyone, and demands change—not just to how we share resources, but what we value and how we make them in the first place.
Morris is a memorable advocate of these dreams (his novel News From Nowhere is a vivid distillation), but they weren’t his alone. And to really see what such a vision might mean for us today, it’s worth tracing them back to the radical working-class movement from out of which they emerged.
In 1871, for two and a half months, the workers of Paris reclaimed their city from the ruling elite and founded a new society, based on mutual aid, solidarity and cooperation. It has become known as the Paris Commune, and the leaps they made in forging a democratic culture have rippled out well into the next century via the writings of Morris, Marx and others. If we let it, it can continue to move us today.
One of their greatest achievements was the Communards exploding of their stale, inherited notions of luxury. The Artists Federation (one of many ‘people’s councils’ established to administrate the Commune) worked tirelessly to collapse the elitist divide between art and life.
They saw it as a crucial part of the struggle to bring the aesthetic into every sphere of the everyday. While the French ruling class, desperate to discredit the movement, lobbed caricatures of “misérabilisme”, in reality, it was a new form of, what the people called, “communal luxury”.
This new aspiration, says Kristin Ross in her 2015 book on the subject, “countered any notion of the sharing of misery with a distinctly different kind of world: one where everyone, instead, would have his or her share of the best.”
We find ourselves, Ross insists, in a historical moment where these ideas are needed. Today’s economic stagnation mirrors that of the French republic in the mid-19th century, as do the tactics of our popular movements. The resonance between the democratic ambitions of Occupy, the movements of the squares, and the Communards doesn’t need to be spelt out.
And even though things have moved on slightly since 2015, there are plenty of new parallels to draw. The escalating caricatures of environmentalists as longing for a return to mud huts and misery chimes with the smears of the French elite.
And debates on the left between degrowth activists and advocates of Fully Automated Luxury Communism also demand an answer to the question we’re revolving around: what kind of luxury is it that we want?
Back to Hoe Street. In among the shops, there are answers being worked out.
Every day the Gleaners Cafe opens, the ingenious cooks (working out of the Hornbeam) look at the random surplus food they’ve been delivered—fruits, vegetables, seeds, you name it—and transform it into gourmet meals.
They take the worst of our system’s overproduction - “the useless luxury of the wealthy” as Ross calls it - and transmute it into something beautiful. And most importantly, their tiered solidarity pricing system ensures it is available to everyone.
The limitations of surplus food demands creativity, and so we find extraordinary constructions: an orange and black bean stew, salsa verde on al dente ptitim couscous with pink pickled onion, or vegan carrot-based salmon. At the risk of overdoing it, I call this approaching the Communard’s dream of ending “all the false dichotomies between the practical and the beautiful, the utilitarian and the poetic, what is used and what is treasured”.
What’s more, every Tuesday, at the ‘People’s Kitchen’, anyone can come and help prepare the day’s meal. Here we find the heart of a communal luxury being built. One session and a handful of people at a time, we are reconnecting with our capacities to create something beautiful in an ordinary day. And the ghost of William Morris, I imagine, is beaming down.
Alternative longings are easy to conceive (and write about) but living, breathing examples are rare. As the fight against the miserable caricatures and smears of the entrenched elite ramp up, the reliable experience of another way will become more and more precious. Humble places like the Gleaners are totems of what’s possible and reminders of how ready our creative capacities are to be revived.
More of Greg Frey’s excellent columns are available here. Greg is mobilising gardeners in Walthamstow with his Time To Grow website.