For three weeks only, a windmill is operating in Dalston. It's art, obviously. But it's also a proper mill with blades and turny things and grindy bits and flour. And, because it's essential to maintain sustainable credentials and ensure low food-miles, there's even a cornfield alongside.
Dalston Mill is an outreach project of the Barbican Art Gallery, extending its green shoots east to an unlikely spot in deepest Hackney. Up Dalston Lane, opposite the worksite where the East London line will terminate next summer, beneath a giant peace mural, where else? The site is an abandonedrailway curve, more recently a site of urban decay and a fly-tipped dumping ground. But it's been transformed for a brief period into an unlikely cross between Norfolk and Hoxton. Most strange.
First thing you'll see from outside are six sails twirling round above a fence of wooden slatting. They're not traditional windmill sails, more a roundabout of giant white woks, perched high atop a tower of makeshift scaffolding. Their rotation powers a small grinder for squelching wheat, and also a mini generator which helps to light the site after dark. You have to venture inside to watch the grinding, entering the mill through a reception and kitchen area. It was a hive of activity on Saturday afternoon, baking small round discs imprinted with four scooped sails. These weren't your normal bread rolls but a very special local currency called the Dalston Slice. All the better if you'd baked them yourself, but there was also the option to hand over a fiver of real money and get two wheaty discs in return.
You could spend your dough in a few carefully selected E8 shops (more your independent stores, not the nearby Argos and Phones4U), and also in the bar conveniently located at the foot of the mill tower. The bar was called Cucum' (a name possibly just the right side of amusing), and it was frequented by trendy types with rakish looks. I was surprised how quickly this eco-installation had become the hangout of choice for various faddish folk, more usually spotted quaffing lager within a half mile of Hoxton Square. One bequiffed beardylad with washer-holed earlobes caught my eye, or at least his wristwatch did. I was wearing one exactly the same, except I'd bought my nerdgeekCasio digital back in the 1980s before he was even born, and his was probably a replica. Suddenly I felt almost, but not quite, cutting edge.
Stretching out towards the horizon (or at least towards a Matalan superstore) was the most photogenic part of the installation. Here was a small field of not-yet-golden corn, transplanted here from Lancashire, and which it's hoped will ultimately be harvested, ground and nibbled on site. The wheatfield idea isn't original - it came from New York in 1982 when Agnes Denes planted some rippling stalks in downtown Battery Park. There it provided a startling urban/rural intervention with a Twin Tower backdrop. Here in downbeat Dalston it merely gives visitors with cameras the opportunity to take arty photos of unlikely ears in front of a graffitied semi-derelict building. So that's what I did. [photo][photo]
You've got until August 6th to pop into to Dalston Mill for yourself. You may not stay long, not unless you get engrossed in one of the many artistic projects scheduled between now and then. There are rather a lot of these, most of an environmentally-overfriendly nature, including cooking masterclasses, psychoanalysis lectures and fire-eating. Or you might stay and let your offspring's pedalpower grind some corn, or maybe sit around in a Southwark Lido deckchair with a slice of cake, or possibly hang around for a drink at the Cucum'. It'll be a field trip to remember.
For three weeks only, a windmill is operating in Dalston. It's art, obviously. But it's also a proper mill with blades and turny things and grindy bits and flour. And, because it's essential to maintain sustainable credentials and ensure low food-miles, there's even a cornfield alongside.
First thing you'll see from outside are six sails twirling round above a fence of wooden slatting. They're not traditional windmill sails, more a roundabout of giant white woks, perched high atop a tower of makeshift scaffolding. Their rotation powers a small grinder for squelching wheat, and also a mini generator which helps to light the site after dark. You have to venture inside to watch the grinding, entering the mill through a reception and kitchen area. It was a hive of activity on Saturday afternoon, baking small round discs imprinted with four scooped sails. These weren't your normal bread rolls but a very special local currency called the Dalston Slice. All the better if you'd baked them yourself, but there was also the option to hand over a fiver of real money and get two wheaty discs in return.
Stretching out towards the horizon (or at least towards a Matalan superstore) was the most photogenic part of the installation. Here was a small field of not-yet-golden corn, transplanted here from Lancashire, and which it's hoped will ultimately be harvested, ground and nibbled on site. The wheatfield idea isn't original - it came from New York in 1982 when Agnes Denes planted some rippling stalks in downtown Battery Park. There it provided a startling urban/rural intervention with a Twin Tower backdrop. Here in downbeat Dalston it merely gives visitors with cameras the opportunity to take arty photos of unlikely ears in front of a graffitied semi-derelict building. So that's what I did. [photo] [photo]
