Sheffield Social Centre Opens

The loca­tion of the Social Cen­tre can now be announced:

Pis­gah House Road in Broomhill, S10 5BJ

You can take a num­ber 52 bus from the cen­tre of town to just past Broomhill at Hoole Road and it’s a two minute walk from there.

The social cen­tre is a non-hier­ar­chi­cal, anti-cap­i­tal­ist space based on a num­ber of core prin­ci­ples which reflect the world its organ­is­ers want to see: co-oper­a­tion and mutu­al aid, open­ness and inclu­sion, vol­un­tary par­tic­i­pa­tion and shared respon­si­bil­i­ty.

It is a place where dis­crim­i­na­tion of any kind is chal­lenged in order to cre­ate as inclu­sive a place as pos­si­ble. One way of achiev­ing this will be through open meet­ings using con­sen­sus deci­sion-mak­ing, which hap­pen every oth­er day at 10am to decide how the cen­tre oper­ates, with the first one of these hap­pen­ing on Thurs­day Octo­ber the 1st.

A pro­gramme of work­shops, dis­cus­sions, and oth­er events is planned for the first fort­night. The full timetable can be found on the Events page and any­one is wel­come to pro­pose things they’d like to organ­ise in the social cen­tre by email­ing info@sheffieldsocialcentre.org.uk, call­ing 07729575582, or by vis­it­ing the cen­tre.

“We’ve estab­lished this space for peo­ple to open­ly dis­cuss and learn from each oth­er about issues of social and envi­ron­men­tal jus­tice, because there’s a chron­ic lack of pub­lic space in which peo­ple can come togeth­er and freely and gen­uine­ly talk about the things they are con­cerned about, and take action togeth­er to change them. The only real way of address­ing the prob­lems of our soci­ety is for us all to realise the pow­er we pos­sess when we act co-oper­a­tive­ly, and help­ing peo­ple to make that real­i­sa­tion is one of our main goals in set­ting up this social cen­tre”.

The build­ing being occu­pied, Pis­gah House, is on the same site as the Tap­ton Exper­i­men­tal Gar­dens, both of which are owned by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Sheffield. In 2007 local res­i­dents defeat­ed a plan­ning appli­ca­tion by prop­er­ty devel­op­ers Miller Homes to demol­ish all of the build­ings on the site.

The last decent social cen­tre we had was Matil­da, but that was evict­ed in sum­mer 2006 by the iron­i­cal­ly named ‘York­shire For­ward.’

Build­ing pho­tos

For events for the first 2 weeks and a map, look at http://sheffieldsocialcentre.org.uk/