The RiPPLE team can’t wait to see what Kingston students do with this year’s theme of changing rooms, an exploration of the literal and figurative transformations of space and the people within those spaces. The theme came from our partnership with The Community Brain, a CIC dedicated to local projects to improve the borough of Kingston.
To give everyone more insight into how this theme came about, we’re going to take a look at the King George’s Playing Fields in Tolworth, the focus of The Community Brain’s next project. The fields are home to Corinthian-Casuals, the highest ranked amateur football club in England. The Corinthians and the Casuals were founded in 1882 and ’83 respectively, before merging in 1939. A Corinthians tour to Brazil in 1910 even sparked the creation of the Sport Club Corinthians Paulista, which is now one of South America’s most successful football clubs.
This should be a thing of pride for Tolworth, but unfortunately, the pavilion that once held the club’s changing rooms has fallen into disrepair. The Community Brain plans to start renovations next year, and the director, Robin Hutchinson, wants to take this opportunity to create a space that reflects, in addition to the impressive sports culture in Tolworth, the wider community of Kingston.
“Kingston has a history of dirty fingernails,” says Robin, speaking to me in the Rose Theatre Kingston. “It designs things, it makes things, it’s innovative.”
Robin has dedicated his career to the building of spaces or “playgrounds” to allow people to express creativity within their community. In reimagining the pavilion, he hopes to celebrate the ingenuity of everyday Kingston residents. He pictures the pavilion as a community centre with not only changing rooms, but a cafe giving job experience to people with learning disabilities and, since it’s on the edge of the greenbelt, a place to learn about and celebrate nature.
But people are more invested in their community when they participate in making it better, and so The Community Brain plans to perform a feasibility study next year to make sure their renovations fit the needs of Tolworth.
Robin believes in the power of allowing others to apply their own creativity to projects, rather than dictating their thoughts and actions. It produces results he could never have imagined, and he hopes that in considering the theme of changing rooms, students will also create something beautiful, communal, something to be proud of. He envisions RiPPLE as “a bible of change...Where you can pick it up, flip through it, and something will resonate with you and make you go, ‘Yeah, that’s right, isn’t it? I can do that’, or ‘I’ve been there’.”
And as students, in new rooms, a new city, perhaps a new country, trying to find our places, this topic is especially poignant to us.
“RiPPLE is the most brilliant word for this project,” says Robin. “Maybe this tiny book, this tiny stone in the water, might go way beyond…change me, change the way I think about things, create a playground of the mind, allow people to go, ‘That’s where I want to live’.”
By Gabriella Buckner