Save Soanes volunteers outside the Soanes Centre in Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park. Save Soanes, May 2025.
The Save Soanes campaign works creatively to resist the dismantling of community infrastructures.
The Campaign
Since 1997, the Soanes Centre has been the base of Setpoint London East, an education charity encouraging local school children in Tower Hamlets to discover the natural world around them through hands-on learning. Over 8,000 students have pass through its doors each year, and over the past 30 years it has become a much loved space for schools, local people, and community gathering around nature. However, in July 2024, Setpoint were issued with an eviction notice by Tower Hamlets council, and the Save Soanes campaign was born – initially resisting the eviction and now continuing to campaign for a secure long term lease.
This campaign sits at the intersection of multiple social issues, from the impact of neglect and loss of vital community and youth spaces, to the equity of access to nature for minoritised communities.
Performers at the Summer Jam, an event held at the Soanes Centre in September 2024 in support of the campaign. Kin Structures, September 2024.
It is an honour and a privilege to be recognised by SMK. As a volunteer-led campaign, this recognition is testament to the power people and community hold, and the capacity that community organising brings to imagine and work towards alternative futures.”
Save Soanes Volunteers
The Change
Through creative work, Save Soanes has been able to draw links between the local, grounded reality of the campaign – the need for a space like this that serves and is led by the local community – and wider themes about ecology, cultural identity and belonging, and the rapid processes of change happening across London.
The complexity of a live campaign has been taken into formal art spaces, including an exhibition at Staffordshire Street Gallery ‘Made Without Permission’. Since this exhibition, Save Soanes’ December Day of Action Art installation, as well as their graphics and copy-writing, have utilised creative practice to draw particular attention to Setpoint as one of very few BAME-led environmental charities in a majority BAME area, highlighting the significance of their work for local children. Engaging in creative work has allowed the campaign to transcend the immediate threat and engage imaginatively with the future.
Save Soanes’ team includes architects, artists, urban researchers, ecologists and more. With the help of supportive partners, we have been able to produce a feasibility study for the building that transforms creative engagement with the local community into a real, tangible proposal for the space and how we can transform it in the future.
The Future
There is a crisis in community space provision in Tower Hamlet, and alongside Save Soanes’ ongoing work towards a secure lease for the Soanes Centre, the Save Soanes team are working with other organisations across the borough to launch a coalition campaign looking at larger scale resolutions to this problem.
The campaign team is also engaging in research on the role of community activism in lending imaginative and operational capacity to organisations under threat, both in an academic and practice-based contexts. As a locally rooted volunteer group, and in collaboration with other organisations, Save Soanes are also developing public programmes that will both archive the work done here in environmental education for the past 30 years, and serve as collective research to develop a vision for the future of the space that recognises both its vital service in supporting members of the local community and pioneering work in environmental education.
Who else was involved?
Save Soanes, Kin Structures, Unit 38, Resolve Collective, Setpoint London East, Head of Education Dimuthu Meehitiya, and education officer Ramya Lindsay.
