Seed in the Cracks: Room to Be, Stuart Hall and Why Now.
Updated: 2 hours ago
How do we understand our present moment? Everything that came before made it possible: our cultural, political and personal histories are the conditions this particular now needed in order to exist. I am thinking of a river that splits into many different streams, its flow shaped by the forces and pressures acting on it. We all know a river doesn't run straight. Its eventual course through a landscape is not predetermined; it depends on the environment, the weather systems, or the will of humans who wish to control it. Our present time, our now, is that same river.
It intrigues me that if conditions globally, nationally and locally had been in any way different, Room to Be and our way of approaching community-making would not exist. For those who do not know how Room to Be operates, I would describe it poetically as setting seeds within the cracks of walls, or, to continue our river analogy, as a dam. How better to control a river? A dam is what the will of humans looks like poured into concrete, so the wall and the river are one story, not two. This wall is designed to control us. When I say 'us' I do not mean solely the queer community or other marginalised groups; we are all affected by this great, ugly wall, though some have a better view and a safe, secure platform, while others cling on by their nails.
When we turn on the news and see headlines of continued conflict, natural disasters and civil unrest, we might feel desperate and ask: what next? We fear things will get worse. Given the current pushback against queer and trans rights, many LGBTQIA+ folk are asking exactly that. Stuart Hall, however, would encourage us instead to ask: why now? Not as a rhetorical lament. Hall, the Jamaican-born British scholar, political activist and pioneer of cultural studies, shows that why now can be used as a diagnostic tool, to understand the present moment and what can be done to challenge it.
Room to Be: the name itself is modest. On the surface it is a claim to space, nothing more. But Hall would ask why this claim, in this form, at this moment. A conjuncture is never simply a continuation of what came before; it is the knot of pressures in which parts of that symbolic wall start to give way and new possibilities, fragile and unguaranteed, emerge. We did not make the cracks; we found them and intend to use them, because where else can we exist? And we intend to grow the way roots grow. A seed lodged in a crack does not smash the wall open; it works patiently at the fissure, widening it a fraction with each season, until what began as a hairline becomes a way through. Queer spaces are most often commercial spaces: the pub, the club, the licensed event. Room to Be centres its activities in a garden, gathering people around growing, making and talking. It is grassroots, free and member-led, built on shared labour rather than consumption. This is not simply hobbies with an identity attached; it is a shift in the site where community is produced, away from the commodity and into the common.
The need for this has only intensified since the pandemic. I do not mean the general sentiment that lockdown deepened our appreciation of nature and of green space for our mental health. I mean the moral panic that rode in on COVID's coattails that the trans community is in some way a threat to our 'traditional British values', gender confusing our children and violating womens rights. This moral panic was powered by a government and media facing economic legitimacy problems and a tattered reputation. This is a centuries-old power tactic (think seventeenth-century witch trials). Hall mapped the mechanism more than half a century ago in Policing the Crisis: the panic conjures a folk devil and rearticulates our anxieties about the economy, decline and belonging into a target that is not the crisis itself. Queer and trans people are living inside that rearticulation right now. Rights won and assumed are being actively withdrawn as a political strategy.
To articulate something is both to express and to link (like an articulated lorry) two different elements. There is nothing intrinsically queer about horticulture, climate preparedness or creativity as means of making community, yet all are core to Room to Be. These connections must be actively made, and this is what Hall would call political work and anchored in this moment in time.
For example,
We link overtly with nature, the seasons and climate action through our concern for the climate crisis and what it will mean for our community. We do not see global leaders taking the action needed to reach net zero, and so we feel it necessary to become better prepared to survive a world with a volatile climate and potential civil unrest.
We look for genuine means of connecting in person rather than online. The dominant way to connect is now digital, where our identities are commodified by social media and scraped by AI. Room to Be wants to model alternatives.
We actively choose degrowth principles and refuse the capitalist impulse to do more, make more and reach more for the sake of 'growth'. Chasing funding is not a priority. Coming together to create free events and to learn from one another matters more.
We want to shift the paradigm away from the individualism that dominates the west. Community, for us, is built on deepening human connection and working collectively, which is why Room to Be operates in partnership with other organisations. We try to balance offering safer queer-led spaces against complete segregation from society: we wish to be both safe and visible.
We see creativity as a way to express ourselves and nurture our inner wellbeing in a soulful way. In a queer culture where religion can be viewed with suspicion because of its history of oppression and exclusion, creativity and mindfulness are a way to re-engage with the human 'spirit', free of dogma.
This articulation, or linking, is Room to Be's counter-hegemonic act: the slow positional work Hall learned from philospher and Marxist thinker, Gramsci. Hegemony cannot be undone in one dramatic takeover; it must be quietly reworked, relationship by relationship, in the ordinary everyday life and institutions of society. It is the work of roots, not the wrecking ball.
But how do we steer Room to Be going forward? The future is impossible to predict. It remains conjunctural, made from the same forces now in motion: climate breakdown, the withdrawal of care by the state, the destruction of jobs through automation, and our desire for non-commodified forms of life (treating time, nature and human relationships as shared commons rather than resources to be exploited for profit and growth). Three futures suggest themselves, and they are not mutually exclusive. One is infrastructure: an accessible garden space, a permanent home, the group settled into the city's cultural fabric. Another is articulation: Room to Be as a node where queer life, climate action and mutual aid connect, defined by what its people contribute rather than by their vulnerability. And the third is a warning, for identity is not fixed but a constant 'becoming'. Room to Be could become a service, captured by the funding logic, delivering measurable 'wellbeing outcomes' while the critical edge and community ownership quietly evaporate.
But the warning carries its own answer, the same one the garden teaches. Identity is a becoming, and walls are worked open by roots rather than felled by demolition. If we stay member-led, free, and linked to the struggles around us, Room to Be will keep widening its crack. And the roots that split concrete also bind riverbanks: they steady the ground precisely where the water wants to change course. A garden is a modest thing. So is a seed in a wall. Both are how the future gets made.
Article by Emile Mackie
Massive thank you to the Cooper Gallery and their programme Jamming: The Ignorant Art School which introduced me to Stuart Hall's work through a screening of The Stuart Hall Project.
If you are interested in finding out more about Jamming Days with the Ignorant Art School, check out this link:
We must mobilise everything we have in terms of intellectual resources in order to understand what keeps making the lives we live and the societies we live in, profoundly and deeply anti-humane.
Stuart Hall
