Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive, RSA on Peckham Space. 

Even before seeing its impressive work there is a strong case for supporting an initiative like Peckham Space. For a community which is experiencing serious social and economic pressures and rapid change there is the value of having opportunities to stand back and consider their lives and their community from the original and challenging perspective offered by art. There is the scope for contact and engagement with artistic creativity to inspire people – particularly perhaps young people – thus challenging expectations and raising aspirations.

These needs are especially great in an area like north Peckham but, writing as Chief Executive of the RSA, I would make a more general connection between today’s challenging times and the work of Peckham Space. Put simply we can’t go on like this. There is a growing gap between our aspirations for ourselves as citizens, and our society, and the trajectory set by current ways of thinking and behaving. The gap will not – in the view of the RSA – be closed simply by wise Government policy, technological innovation or commercial entrepreneurship. We need all of this but we also need to re-imagine ourselves as citizens. In short we need a population – locally, nationally and globally – which is more engaged, more resourceful and more inclined to act pro-socially.

This is why artists should embrace social engagement. Art – especially publicly subsidised art – should not be shy of claiming a social role as well as intrinsic merit. This purpose lies not in the narrow, quantitative objectives of many public services but in the deeper need for a new consciousness and idea of citizenship for the twenty-first century.

These may seem like abstract thoughts with which to start an introduction to an impact report, but they were just the kind of ideas which surfaced in a recent event hosted jointly by Peckham Space and the RSA Fellowship. The event focussed on a piece of work jointly commissioned by Peckham Space and Evolution Quarter Residents Association: Slipstream by David Cotterrell is a two screen installation showing film shot partially from the air using a custom-built miniature helicopter. Cotterrell’s aim was to rediscover views of North Peckham which had been lost when the modernist estate was demolished. Another film traces the routes of former streets long since overlaid by successive redevelopments.

The conversation which took place with David reflected so much of the public value of Peckham Space. Academics, art enthusiasts and local social activists talked about memory, community, and engagement. Hundreds of such conversations involving thousands of people have taken place in the Space’s short life.

The bridges made through the Space’s various commissions and events are not just between different people and institutions but also between ideas, overcoming prejudices and predispositions. "Is the best way to engage people in art not to tell them it’s art?" asked one guest, to which David Cotterrell replied that his experience of engagement with local people was remarkably free of the populist antipathy to modern art too often shown by the media. At which someone else chipped in that there was also a common but equally misconceived notion that the BAME community was uninterested in contemporary art. This too has been challenged in the day-to-day practice of Peckham Space.

The diversity of the Space’s work, its partners and audiences speak to its mission of increasing participation. Also, at a time when rising student fees threaten to discourage disadvantaged communities from aspiring to university, the Space’s connection to the University of the Arts is a fine example of innovative outreach. The benefits have flowed both ways. The Space’s graduate internship programme has offered opportunities for students to work with established artists and to develop a hands-on experience of socially engaged arts practice. In years to come many artists will cite their formative time working with Peckham Space. Positive media coverage in national, local, specialist and general publications has chipped away at lazy assumptions and disturbing connections about this part of London, helping instead to link Peckham with words like art, creativity and collaboration.

The project has not been afraid to hold up its practice to proper scrutiny in the form of statistical measures, external assessment and community satisfaction. These metrics are used not just to boast of achievement but as the basis for committing to new challenges and ambitions.

Beyond the statistics there have been the magic moments when Peckham Space has made something happen which no one could have predicted or planned. The moment of creativity lies not just in the way commissioned artists engage with the community but also in the reaction the commissions elicit; those moments of interest, bemusement, recognition and empathy as the work ripples back out into the public sphere.

After talking to a packed room flanked by his screens, David Cotterrell and Peckham Space Director Emily Druiff took us on a walk to the site from where David had flown his helicopter. Local residents watched with amusement as a crocodile of fifty people walked slowly across the North Peckham estate, many of them sharing reminiscences about their own connections with the area: an arts administrator visited her mum here for decades; a veteran campaigner for the preservation of local heritage had delivered her first political leaflet in the early eighties, when the estate was starting to get a reputation as a no-go area.

Finally, we stopped by two water towers, virtually the only physical reminders of the tarnished idealism of the old estate with its walkways in the sky. As David spoke about how the estate would have looked and the views and perspectives he had tried to rediscover from his flying camera, a cloud burst. The talk continued as we huddled under an array of colourful umbrellas.

I wondered if perhaps someone in the surrounding flats was taking a photograph of this strange scene. For this is Peckham Space, deepening a sense of place and community, bringing the past into the present in unexpected and challenging ways, but more than that: creating tomorrow’s memories for a part of London that keeps changing its face but need never lose its heart.

Find out more about Matthew Taylor and the RSA at: www.thersa.org