Grounds for Development

The ongoing development of Canada Water and the surrounding Surrey Docks has brought substantial demographic and economic change. The radical transformation of the area over so short a period compelled us to ask how the sense of community there has been affected — both for existing residents whose community has been greatly altered, and for new arrivals finding their place in a rapidly shifting terrain.

An informal café housed inside a council estate, found on the first site visit, turned our attention to cafés as sites where business and leisure meet: a useful subject through which to investigate the impact of development on the articulation of community.

Cafés became the film’s primary actor. As business owners with a vested interest in the community of an area, we expected them to hold a multidimensional perspective on both the economic and the demographic dimensions of development. Interviews were standardised so they could be compared, and shot as medium and medium close-up so that the words carry while the room stays visible behind them. Vox pops and b-roll were gathered around the sites to corroborate, contrast or complicate what was said on camera.

“We chose to investigate development by revealing its contours through each café’s contention with its influence.”

The difficulty was one of restraint: making that influence visible without becoming prescriptive, and allowing the film to be investigative rather than polemic.

What the research revealed is that the formation of community in a developing site such as Canada Water is legible in the manner by which cafés are engaged with by residents, new and old. MakeMake Coffee evidenced how major economic factors in development shape the inhabitation of a site. The Barn showed how community can be constituted around sites of consumption and leisure. H’s Cafe suggested that these places do not only reflect the change wrought by development, but can play an active role in shaping it.

The wider claim is methodological: choosing a specific site as a heuristic can offer unique insight when investigating the built environment. A café is small enough to film and general enough to argue from.