“When you take the buildings away from us, you deny us of our presence, our spaces to organise, galvanise, and centralise our efforts. When you take away these buildings, you deny our visual presence in the local landscape, you deny us opportunities to come together on a social and political level and create safe spaces to educate our children about cultural histories in ways that empower our communities. The systematic impermanence/dispossession of these spaces makes us/our community feel unstable. Our memories of these spaces represent an unacknowledged trauma that affects both the physical and mental health of individuals and the community.”

- Tracey Jarrett

Autonomous: a group having the freedom/right/power to self-govern or control its affairs.

Led by members of the Deptford and wider Lewisham Community, the Black Autonomous Spaces project studies how Black communities have creatively shaped neighbourhoods and practices of community support and solidarity. Working with community groups and organisers across the borough, we consider what actions against British imperialism and institutional racism instigated earlier generations to create Black-led community spaces? From the perspective of our present day struggles, we ask, what are the forces that underlie the ongoing closures, displacements, and policy incursions into these spaces and programmes today? With community organisers and elders from across the borough, we are shaping a collective definition of what George Beckford calls ‘Black dispossession’, through memory and ongoing efforts to maintain community-organised Black spaces and services.

We take as a point of departure the Deptford Dockyard, an important site in histories of colonial violence, enslavement, and racism, and the place of the current Convoy’s Wharf development, which threatens to displace communities and their histories. Here, we link the struggle for autonomy of earlier generations with our own ongoing campaigns to preserve Black-led spaces and services. How are histories of struggle for freedom echoed in the efforts to maintain their autonomy and existence today?

By presenting the evidence and impacts of important community infrastructures, we acknowledge local sites as both buildings and what Ruth Gilmore Wilson has described as ‘infrastructures of feeling’. We acknowledge the losses, celebrate the people and work who made them, and plot our ongoing struggles to maintain autonomy. How do we preserve, maintain, and grow the spaces we have built and those that our predecessors built before us? How can we use this project to protect ourselves and these spaces in the future?

Historical and contemporary services, spaces, and campaigns are marked by a different location on the map, and on QR codes in the local area. If you have a space you would like to see represented, get in touch with us at dphmuseum@gmail.com.

The project is led by local community organiser and radio broadcaster Tracey Jarrett, who is working with museum founder Joyce Jacca and researcher Choe Murr. We are mentored by Nottingham activist and researcher, Lisa Robinson, from the Legacy Project and are indebted to the important work of Professor Joan Anim-Addo.