do it yourself

a plot nobody uses

Frozen land has no programme, no caretaker and nobody whose job it is to say no.

Every city has ground that is legally busy and physically empty: an inheritance in dispute, a project on hold, a strip used by builders as free storage. Nature moves in, the whole street looks at it every day, and nobody has ever stood in it. One evening in a place like that changes what everybody living around it thinks the place is for — which is a bigger result than the evening itself.

Somewhere else, on a day like the one you are planning. About 80 people stayed and ate.

what it takes

an hour spent finding out who owns it, and a first name to ask for
a wheelbarrow or a trolley, because everything comes in and out by hand
the site's own materials for the kitchen: stones for the stove, rubble for the counter
water and light you have brought, because there will be neither
one thing that is obviously deliberate — a long table, a doorway, a lit box
something that makes it smell of cooking, which carries past a fence in a way a poster does not

Borrowed beats bought, every time, and nothing on this list has to match anything else on it. Half of it is not cooking equipment: the chalk, the game, the one light and the spare seat are what turn a place into an evening.

what to do

Walk in and stand there for half an hour. A plot nobody uses has no gate that matters, and standing in it tells you where the ground is level and where the sun goes.
Find the owner and ask badly rather than not asking at all. Most frozen land is frozen because nobody has been interested in it for years.
Clear it first, and let the clearing be seen from the street. That is the argument, made without a word of it.
Build one thing that is unmistakably on purpose. A table, a doorway, a lit container — anything that says this is not fly-tipping.
Hold the kitchen up with what is already on site. Two stones and a slab is a stove, and it says what the whole evening is about.
Make it smell. Scent gets past the fence and reaches people who would never read a flyer.
After dark, light one thing and leave the rest dark, so the place has a middle to walk towards.
Invite the two nearest streets by knocking on doors rather than by posting anything.
Photograph it full of people and give the photograph to the owner. That is what gets you the second evening.

and then

Send us a photograph of the people, not of the food. That is the whole ask — no forms, no affiliation, nothing to join. If you want a hand first, the handbook is the long version of this, and asking us costs nothing.

This page is meant to be passed on. Its address is www.promenoodology.com/do-it-yourself/a-plot-nobody-uses.