Peckham Space commissioned Lottie Child and Furtherfield.org to develop the Peckham Street Training project.

Our surroundings have an effect on us, we feel different in a sunny, open street that is filled with trees to a dark alleyway filled with rubbish. We know that our surroundings have an effect on the ways we feel but we don’t often realise that we can have an effect on the streets by the ways we behave and the things we do. Street Training is training together to behave safely and joyfully in order to have a positive effect on ourselves, each other and the streets we move through.

The Peckham Street Training Tours on Saturday 20th September, devised with 10 year old children from the area, explored the positive effect we might on Peckham when we use the streets safely and joyfully.

The tours started from the Peckham Space stall in Peckham Square where performances by local bands and poets and stalls run by local people encouraged people to engage with green issues.

Lottie Child and four children from Gloucester Primary School, Abid, Gafar, Maria, Sophie led two public Street Training tours to share the ways that they had found to have fun in the streets of Peckham. The tour included moves that they had devised with their classmates, Yemisi and Abigale in two intensive training sessions. New techniques included rolling down a grassy hill, climbing a lamppost, picking apples, the mobile limbo, looking for ants, bounding up steps like an animal, making a wish by blowing a dandelion clock and throwing helicopter seeds from a wall.

Lottie has listed and described all the new ways of being joyful in Peckham in this blog post and has compiled a full list of all the ways that we could think of for staying safe in the streets here.

Ruth from Furtherfield.org has also written here about the process of building the Street Training website (which uses Drupal, Free, Open Source Community building software) as a way to help Peckham Street Trainers and others to connect with each other (wherever they are) and share and develop their new techniques for joyfulness and safety in the streets, long into the future.





John Clare took photographs of the public tours. To see all of these images click here.