I FOUND A NEW CLUB!

Liner Notes #3 - A radical new space in central London, red beans a la Pableaux Johnson, and how to green my concrete megablock?

Hello!

Welcome back to Liner Notes. A selection of news, threads and ideas that emerge through my exploration of PLACE and all things LOW.

Here we are at the start of what our favourite super-sensible, yet highly cosmic astrologer, Pam Gregory, says will be a year “unlike anything any of us will ever have experienced.”

And the number one thing she says we must do to cope with this ‘white knuckle ride’ is to GROUND.

Get our hands in the soil.

Get our feet on the grass.

Get still and get in community.

Here are a few ways I’m finding to do that, by tuning into the tasty meatspace (!) in my area…

⚡BUZZING UP MY LOWLINES LATELY⚡

PLACE: Kairos Club - 84 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4TG

The ‘meatspace’ I’ve been waiting for that doesn’t feel like it was birthed in a spreadsheet.

And it’s a 15 minute walk from my flat! I spotted a flyer about it in a bookshop while roaming my area one afternoon in January. Kairos: named for the non-linear, ‘collapsed’ version of time that the Greeks played with (as opposed to the more boundaried and linear chronos, to which we in the west are so deeply tethered), I knew this was right up my chutney Mary before I’d even got there.

It’s located in a disused furniture shop on Tottenham Court Road - the furniture strip of London until recent times, but which now feels a bit…nothingy, seemingly a patchwork street of whatever landlords can get for their space. So this place is unexpected and acts like a BALM for anyone, like me, seeking rich and energising conversation, ease of being in a space that is deliberately not designed for consumption, and a break from the shadow of fear that seems to be taking hold of so many of us in these ‘whiplash’ days of early 2025.

Vision:

Talks (on becoming citizens of place, on Britain’s common land, on the Communards of 19th Century Paris 😍), book club, screenings, sewing, communal feasts, a library brimming with fresh ideas; it is an antidote and brilliant example of how to repurpose space - from commercial real estate to genuinely communal use.

It's founder, Zoë Blackler took it upon herself to hit up property people to see what spaces were sitting empty and struck a deal on this old sofa shop in the heart of the city that was otherwise just languishing.

This is the future. London may be navigating an identity crisis at the mo but 🔥 is coming through… No pics because no devices allowed inside, but get on this, it’s wonderful.

www.kairos.london

PEOPLE: Pableaux Johnson

And the eternal reverbs of Monday night red beans, rice and cornbread

Red Beans a la Pableaux Johnson was a New Orleans tradition of a tradition. Red beans cooked up on ‘wash day’ is common all over the city, and Pableaux did it religiously, inviting a couple of handfuls of people to sit round his grandma’s old formica-top table every Monday to eat, drink and tell stories. Stimulating, lively, cosy, often super rowdy, full of interesting people who go onto become friends, all gathered round this one big pot of beans, with rice, green onions for garnish, cornbread fresh from the cast iron - and always the hot sauce.

I say ‘was’ because a couple of weeks ago our darling Pableaux died. There must be hundreds, maybe thousands of us who are left heartbroken by this. A loss of a hearth of a man and a loss of a wonderful way of creating a hearth.

In his honour I’ve started doing Monday night red beans here at my place in Bloomsbury. Reviving his tradition because (apparently) there are fewer and fewer gatherings happening, and because I miss it. I miss the experience of having this so regularly available in New Orleans, I miss running an organisation whose original MO was to gather strangers around food. And goddamn, am I going to miss me some Pableaux Johnson.

THE RULES: turn up with whatever you want to drink, leave your phone in your bag, grab a seat and get into it with each other. It’s not a dinner party - like Pabs used to say, “it’s just supper”. The beauty of the red beans is that it’s one pot, super casual and the same every time - makes more space for the company and the conversation to flow.

Message me if you like the sound of this and want to come - this newsletter is currently so intimate that I likely know most of you on here already, and even if I don’t - I do so love meeting new people ; )

THINGS: Greening the podiums at the Brunswick

The building I live in is pure concrete. It is an embarrassment of concrete. Wall-to-wall, top to bottom, great imposing A-frames, concrete balconies, concrete corridors, concrete underground cinema. All concrete everything. And below my balcony, just above the parade of shops, is a kind of mezzanine level - the podium - on each side of this double ‘megablock’, 6000 sq ft of bare concrete, doing nothing.

Nobody wants to hang out in a space that, save for some isolated boxed evergreens, has nothing but concrete - vast swathes of empty, cold grey. I stare down at it thinking, THIS IS MAD.

Me and my green-fingered neighbour, Jo, who has a cascading balcony of edenic proportions over on the other side, have put in a bid for funding from Camden to begin planting it up. This space was originally intended by the architect, Patrick Hodgkinson, to be a kind of pleasure garden - maybe something like this - but commercial interests inevitably took over. The shops come first, whilst residential use of space is secondary. Our goal is to repurpose this space back to its original vision - a wonderful contrast of concrete and green to help cool the hot concrete in the summer, invite more wildlife in and entice more of us down to what could be the most soothing and communal spot.

We’re starting small with asking to plant up the 72 empty planters, currently redundant, with herbs and climbers. Baby steps, but let’s see…Reading Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time as inspo - it’s gorgeous!

Thanks for reading and as ever:

Stay low, yall,

Petra 💫

The first series of Lowlines is out on Apple here and Spotify here, as well as all the other platforms - including the Lowlines website.