Moving to Plymouth, I spent my time walking through the city landscape. from the shared house I would call home for a year to the city centre, I would walk past a college, a series of churches, a military barracks, and an active dockyard all joining along a road called ‘Union Street’.  The street was filled with restaurants and food from across the world, social sector housing, of course, an Aldi and Lidl, and a series of derelict buildings with everyone presenting some form of life inside with hand-painted signs acting as calls of demand.  

Curiosity drawing me in I began talking to the Co-Founder and Director. Over a cuppa, we discussed stakeholders in the city, creative collaboration and what the community wants. Knowing the Master students at Plymouth University would be putting on an end-of-year show, I approached the Design students first, to use their specialism and help display their work in one of the most iconic music venues in the South-West of the UK and also host community workshops. This could be from a calligraphy workshop, and support in local start-ups to facilitating creative workshops to understand what the community wants, this became very beneficial to one student who went on to look at hybrid health care within the neighbourhood.   

Producing an event at this scale was energetic and required a strong student-led team. Furthermore, enlisted the challenges of working in a building that started as a cinema in 1932, then a roller disco venue in the 80’s, to then being a club with music icons such as Eberhard Kranemann performing. Sadly, the venue closed in 2004 and was left derelict. However, a tracing of the building can be seen through its immense architecture, distorted hand-painted graphics and half-built staircases. With no mains electricity and half of the venue unsafe the exhibition took on a new form, to communicate with The Millenium’s history and memory. The temporal raw material to act as display furniture spoke in the space language of the building scaffolding.