Like your coffee with storytelling and great architecture? The Movement Cafe's for you

Date
7 September 2012

I know it’s a bit of a cliche but oh my, haven’t this summer’s Olympic games brought a lot of good to London? Ridiculous amounts of regeneration, some beautiful creative collaborations and not least a huge heap of good old-fashioned patriotism. So what harm could there possibly be in letting you in on one more?

Nestled among that long list of Olympic goodness is the brainchild of It’s Nice That favourite Morag Myerscough and Olympic Poet and prolific tweeter Lemn Sissay with their creative collaboration The Movement Cafe. A temporary cafe and performance space found right next to the DLR station in Greenwich, the cafe is a real celebration of creativity, performance, architectural greatness and once more has some really tasty locally-source food. Sounding good? You haven’t heard the half of it…

Being built from scratch in just 16 days (wow!) to neatly coincide with the opening of the Olympics, the site previously was home to a building site but luckily developers were all too aware that as the gateway to the Olympic borough it was important that the site was attractive and thus an idea was born and rather impressively turned around within weeks!

The design for the cafe was inspired by one of Sissys’s tweets in which Myerscough then took words and phrases from and painted them by hand on large wooden panels which now form the centrepiece of the design-concious creation.

Sitting at the centre of an amphitheatre-like space the cafe hosts storytelling, poetry reading and acoustic performances several times a week and with all the furniture (including an array of cushions hand sewn from kite fabric) being made by Morag herself together with fellow artist Luke Morgan, the cafe is quite a sight.

But if all that hasn’t already sent you into excited ooh- I-have-to-go-now sort of frenzy, the cafe is also brilliant in the fact that it is run by a local not-for-profit organisation (Greenwich Co-Operative Development Agency) who work with disadvantaged communities across London meaning that your hour or so of eating muffins there is actually doing some good! Selling organic, fair-trade, sustainable and locally-sourced food and drinks including home-made ice creams (Mmmm) I doubt you’ll need much more persuading.

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The Movement Cafe

Above

The Movement Cafe

Above

The Movement Cafe

Above

The Movement Cafe

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