166 - Loft and Kite

Yesterday, I was watching Joshua Charow's YouTube channel which documents the remaining artists living and working in New York's oldest loft spaces. I love the history, memories and atmosphere. It's poignant - the artist communities inevitably disperse after the creativity and vigour they bring to an area gets monetised by property developers.

When I was a kid there was an area in Cambridge (UK) called The Kite. I remember it had a strong sense of community and people put up quite a fight when much of the area was to be demolished to make a shopping centre. I didn't live in the centre of town so I didn't have much awareness of it, but I remember the colour and the energy.

I've just been researching a bit, and it's a funny thing but it turns out that I worked with two of the key characters from the community. They were Virginia and Patrick La Charite and they ran a cafe called Waffles in the centre of the Kite area. After the demolition started, they moved the cafe to another area - Castle Hill and as kid I had a Saturday evening job there, washing up and heating up waffle filling. As some people have mentioned on a couple of discussion threads I saw, Patrick was pretty eccentric. I thought he was absolutely ancient, partly because he had a white beard and hair, but he must have only been about 45.

Ironically, the shopping centre that was new in the 1980s (and replaced The Kite) has just been put up for sale.

This is great - a lovely Radio Cambridgeshire show about the history of The Kite which touches on the gap in experience between people who lived outside of the 'walled city' of the University and those inside.

Writing this blog is like rifling through pages of memories it's so weird.