Radical Imagination
We believe the future of education lies in decentralised interdependent spaces for learning embedded within community organising. As a building site in process that has housed families and workers across 300 years House of Annetta enables us to reimagine the very ordinary constructions of home, care, and the material world. We have been testing out peer-to-peer programmes, events, workshops and exhibitions.
☯︎ Systems RIP
We run a yearly participant-lead action research programme, Systems RIP. Systems must end, and be transformed - but also RIP stands for learning through doing, Research In Practice.2023▸ 75 participants, working across Food, Urban, Energy, Land, and Body systems using dance, listening, film screenings, spinning wool.
2024▸ 40 participants, meeting weekly over the course of 6 weeks. Groups focused on Housing Coops, living in precarious conditions, peer-to-peer care, mental health, decolonial relationships to land, the role of art in activism, and sharing knowledge between campaign and organising groups.
2025▸ 12 individuals and groups, meeting weekly over the course of 10 weeks. Experiments included systems of land ownership, colonial histories of map-making, cuts to legal aid, childcare, commons in small publishing communities and ways of collectivising assets for activists.
☯︎ Perpetual Stew
Generated by participants from SYSTEMS RIP 2023, Perpetual Stew is a week-long event focused on spatial justice and knowledge justice in and around House of Annetta. Each night is accompanied by a big pot of stew, filled with ingredients and ideas brought by guests.2023▸ Landlocked Exhibition featuring artworks responding to hostile architecture, migration, queer bodies and trespass.
Tuesday 29th: Stew + storytelling - with Saif, Taha and Alanna exploring cockney language, cultural thickness and morris dancing.&
Wednesday 30th: Plural Paths through Spitalfields - neighbourhood walks exploring black histories, alternative community masterplans, and food sovereignty
Thursday 31st: The state of/ the state in London - skill-share and discussion about urban enclosure, with homelessness solidarity group Streets Kitchen and Autonomous Winter Shelter.
Friday 1st: Trespass with right to roam - a collective walk to the Royal Geographical Society Conference, exploring the boundaries around academic knowledge production
Launch of ab__ solidarity action research network
2024▸ Museum of Enclosure Exhibition: featuring the first collection of works for this itinerant project exploring ways of representing and understanding lived experiences of land privatisation.
Tuesday 29th October: Something like housing-care-movementbuilding-damp-mould-shelter but better - an evening sharing around homelessness, resident resistance, and research.
Wednesday 30th October: Community Organising and Anti-fascism - neighbourhood walks by Suresh Singh and David Rosenberg, sharing testimonies of local organising across decades and centuries.
Thursday 31st October: International Solidarities - facilitated by Feminist Assembly of Latin Americans (FALA), a night of sharing knowledge with the Nanny Solidarity Network (NSN).
Friday 1st November: Launch of the Museum of Enclosure
2025▸ USE/RIGHTS exhibition: What is a right to space? Who protects it? What secures it? Use-rights are informal rights to use land that are not backed up by the law and its violent enforcements.
Saturday 20th September: Political Prisoners with Nejma Collective, Cradle Collective, Nijjormanush and Safarjal Press, connecting the prison industrial complex from PREVENT to Palestine.
Sunday 21st September: Occupation as a Tool with Tottenham Families Fightback and Trans Kids Deserve Better share how occupation can be a means of resistance, community power, and care.
Monday 22nd September: Neighbourhood Walks: navigating Spitalfields tracing the projects and campaigns of Kay Jordan, and the contested ground of the Save Brick Lane Campaign.
Tuesday 23rd September: Land Registration: on the centenary of the 1925 land registry acts in England and Wales, scholar-practitioners Lora Fox O’Mahony, Lucy Finchett Maddock and Sarah Keenan help us remember just how recent the “capitalist” property market is.
Wednesday 24th September: Migrant Solidarity: workshops on Legal Support 101 and Migrant Narratives with Migrants Rights Network.
☯︎ Learning Through Making
To test out ways of using the space at 25 Princelet Street, we have commissioned repairs and craft projects around the building. All of the projects have involved some learning: through sharing skills via workshops, training apprenticeships, or testing out new techniques. Annetta’s repair work process was a deliberate combination of theoretical and practical learning. This is the model for the longer term refurbishment of the building as an education programme: a mix of heritage craft skills, practical D-I-Y and building maintenance, as well as learning about material ecology, supply chains, care and spatial justice.✿ Land In Our Names (LION): Garden scaffolding
⏍ Imani Qamar: Garden Planters
☡ Monika Kolarz: Handrail
✲ Daisy Moore: Rooflights
﹆Ash, James and Sofia: Second Floor
⚡︎ Tash, Regan, Nicola: Rewiring (Amy’s Electrics)
⌲ Het Thompson: Door Knocker
☡ Rose Keyes and Fawzyiah Rahman: Door and Window repairs
⏢ Exhibition Space
The downstairs rooms and garden pavilion are available for hire. We prioritise groups who are engaged with spatial justice. The spaces are full of character, with the traces of previous residents. We are located just off Brick Lane, and get lots of passers-by.Past exhibitions:
2025 Rand Hamdallah and Shahd Itbakhi with Bosla Arts - That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore
2025 Sarah Ainslie - Drifting Across the Peripheries of an Urban Landscape
2025 Marf Summers and Sam Godfrey - burn the sheets (an exhibition of trans domesticities)
2024 Elisavet Kalpaxi - Landscape with Fountains, a Place of One’s Own
2024 Assemble - Barry Flanagan, the works
2023 Ed Gray - Scenes of Innocence and Experience
2023 Sian Kelly - Metamorphosis
2023 Lucy Robbins - Land Locked
2023 Alyse Stone - The Black Alchemisphere
Annetta made marquetry panels using wood veneers