11. Lockdown and The Mill
Part of People Making Things Happen, a Big Lottery funded project exploring the history of The Mill.
1. Natasha McFadzean
Well, that was very sudden, wasn’t it, for everybody? It was a bit like starting The Mill again. We didn’t know how long it would go on for; in my mind, I thought four or five weeks, which is crazy, when you look back on it. It was very hard. It was a bit scary. We closed March 20th, I think was our last day. And we obviously had to tell everybody that we were closing pretty suddenly. It’s so hard. I mean, we’re a community centre, we’re here for our community, for people, they drop in for all sorts of reasons. And so we still wanted to be there for the community, it was very difficult and a complete change for us when you can’t have a building, so we stayed in touch with our volunteers, to make sure that they were all right. It was difficult for all of us in different ways, some of us had children as well that we needed to homeschool. And we were fortunate enough through our great fundraiser to get some funding towards doing some online stuff. Everybody had to learn Zoom and we took some of our groups online. And we also started up a Thursday social coffee group so that people could still come and see us and say hello and have a chat and not feel alone. But of course, not everybody is able to use technology, so that was difficult.
Before we re-opened in July, some of the volunteers offered to open the space as a food bank, so we were open on Fridays for people to donate food to the food bank. And volunteers mainly ran that, and some staff, and then we opened in July. And people came in, and it was very slow to start with. We didn’t have all of our spaces open, we didn’t have the children’s room open, so that was really, really tough.
We opened the door to increase ventilation. And I remember the first week we opened and people would just pop their heads in and say, ‘Oh, it’s so nice to see you open,’ And I think that just gave people comfort that things were getting back a little bit more normally. So we kind of plodded along with a few things that we were able to run. With the government guidance, we were restricted on the activities that we could have. And then we closed again in December, so that was back to everything online again. And by then I guess we were a bit more used to it. We were a bit more established, we had lots of fantastic activities that you could take part in, that you could follow easy instructions. Lots of our people who ran activities before here, in person, took their activities online as well.
2. Helen Johnston
At the time, there was really unclear guidance from the government about what was going on. So it was like, we might have to be the source of reason as it were, because we might not be getting the guidance from the government, to really tell us what to do on a local level. So, I’d been thinking about ‘well, can we do some stuff online?’ we’ve never really done stuff online, we are a very physical place, the whole model of what we do is based around this physical building, when people come to the space, and we very rarely do stuff that’s even outside of the building, let alone not in a physical place. Can The Mill be the people rather than the space itself? So we came up with this idea of at the very least, if we’re just being a constant presence on social media. So the week or two before leading up to when they’d started to advise people not to go out and stuff, we started to say we’re going to be posting regularly on social media. And just things that you can do at home, stuff to be thinking about, nice things. We were just saying we’re going to be a regular presence, so that if you are at home and you’re on your own, or you know, you just need something that’s not in your immediate home environment, then you’ll know there’s something from The Mill every morning. So we shut I think on the Friday, and then I think they announced a lockdown the following Monday. And then it was just like, well what do we do now? and it took us a little while to figure that out.
3. Rasheeqa Ahmad
There’s been various events through the years where we would say ok, we’ll begin at The Mill, we’ll walk up Coppermill Lane towards the Marshes. And often, you don’t even get to the Marshes, because there’s so many things just to see on the pavement and under the trees, particularly during the lockdown. So it made me really shift my gaze to the streets. And I remember, in particular, there was a bit of funding to run activities for people during the lockdown who might have been isolated. So once we were allowed to take groups out we did these walks, where we just walked around the streets, I think from The Mill through to St. James’s Park. And it just makes you more aware and connects more with the herbs – both wild ones growing out of the cracks, and the ones in people’s gardens that you can point out..