Torriano Meeting House

Poetry Art Politics Community 

Torriano Meeting House  is a user-funded grass-roots volunteer-run arts and community organisation in Kentish Town. We are best known for our poetry events but we have many other long running strands including storytelling for adults, writing and storytelling workshops, hosting local political campaigning groups, theatrical events, left wing folk club, and we very much support grass-roots creativity and social change.  

Torriano is a space for you to organise events and projects.

“What is the purpose of resisting corporate globalization if not to protect the obscure, the ineffable, the unmarketable, the unmanageable, the local, the poetic and the eccentric? So they need to be practiced, celebrated and studied too, right now.” – Rebecca Solnit

 

If you would like to make a financial contribution, donate here:

Janet Hatherley and Kathryn Southworth read

Vole Book Launch

Thursday 9^th May, 7-9pm. Poets from the floor. Free entry. Refreshments.
Janet Hatherley and Kathryn Southworth read from their new publications

On Grandmothers

An evening to celebrate grandmothers

Join us from 6pm Thursday 16th May, free but donations to Torriano welcome

Textile. Art. Literature. Film. (film and readings start at 7.30pm)

We invite you to contribute to this event if you have or had a special relationship with your grandmother too.

You can perform your writing at the event, or bring your artwork between 5-8pm to the Torriano on Monday 13th May when we set up. If you have any questions email hayblanka@gmail.com.

Organisers: Ágnes Háy, Molly Rae Withers, Blanka Gilda Viola Hay and Isobel Landell Mills

Torriano Poetry Sunday 28 April

Sundays 7.30pm. £6/£5 according to pocket. Poets from the floor welcome.

Guest reader: Harry Eyres reads from the new Hearing Eye publication, Dear Departed.

Harry Eyres has been a theatre critic, wine writer, poetry editor and for a decade wrote the ‘Slow Lane’ column in the Financial Times. He is the author of Hotel Elseo (Hearing Eye, 2006), Beginner’s Guide to Plato’s The Republic, Horace and Me: Life Lessons from an Ancient Poet (2013), Johnson’s Brexit Dictionary (Pushkin Press, 2018). He has had a long relationship with Torriano Meeting House.

Torriano Poetry in Cyberspace.

Every Sunday at 6.30pm Kathryn Southworth hosts a Zoom gathering. “Doors” open 6.15pm. Free, donations appreciated. All welcome. Bring poems to read or just listen:
Join Zoom Meeting

Here Comes Everybody: Readings from Finnegans Wake

Friday April 26, 7.30pm

James Joyce’s final novel, published in 1939, is the Everest of Western literature: bristling with riddles, wordplay and linguistic obscurities, it is also inventive, freewheeling, lyrical in parts, earthy and hilarious in others. We’ll be opening a door to this strange dreamworld with readings by Teresa Jennings and Oengus Macnamara, and music from Joolie Wood, Ian Hothersall and Mark Kluzek.

Tickets cost £12. Early booking is advisable:

Register on Eventbrite

Torriano Poetry

Sundays 7.30pm. £6/£5 according to pocket. Poets from the floor welcome.

24 March No reading; 31 March Easter Sunday: no reading

7th April Chrys Salt and saxophonist Richard Ingham
Home Front/Front Line

Poet Chrys Salt continues her 12 year collaboration with international saxophonist Richard Ingham with Home Front/Front Line, a dialogue in poetry, music and prose  that explores what it means to be a life-long pacifist and mother whose son is fighting in the Iraq war. Home Front/Front Line couldn’t be more relevant in the light of current conflicts in both Gaza and Ukraine.

… a  deeply unsettling way of making (us) look again at long-familiar events, as though the mother of Wilfred Owen or Edward Thomas had kept a verse diary during the first world war.  (The Morning Star)

Chrys Salt writes poetry, plays, books, features and direct in the theatre. She has written and edited many books and magazines and held residencies and performed her work in the UK, American, France, Canada, Germany and Finland. Work has been broadcast on both Radio 3 and 4, read by Chrys and by others, and has appeared in many anthologies, magazines and journals. Chrys is a trained performer and worked as an actress for many years before focussing on directing and writing. She is Artistic Director of the Bakehouse, a flourishing arts venue in South West Scotland and runs performance and skills development workshops for professional actors at the London Actors Centre, and in writing and performance country wide.
http://www.chryssalt.com/

 Richard Ingham has an international reputation as a leader in his field and is in great demand across the UK and abroad as a performer and teacher, as well as receiving regular composition commissions for both solo and chamber music ensemble works.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Ingham

March and April

Torriano Poetry 10th March

Sunday 10th March, 7.30pm

Poets from the floor welcome. £6/£5 according to pocket

Hosted by Pauline Sewards

International Women’s Day 2024

Cosmoscope

Welcome to the Cosmoscope, an art exhibition running throughout March 2024 at the Torriano Meeting House. 

Cosmoscope is a combination of words: ‘Cosmos’, from kosmos, the Greek word for ‘world’, is confronted by ‘scope’, the call to investigate. Artists in this exhibition used various media to explore their own corner of the universe, whether that be a real, desired, dystopian, ephemeral, domestic or endangered world. Through their diverse perspectives and disciplines, they confront the pressing issues of our time: how should we think about, feel, or picture the boundary between self and world? 

The works displayed navigate the intricate balance between the tangible and the abstract, the personal and the universal. Evoking themes and concepts such as climate change, belonging, the everyday, and the home, a journey through the Cosmoscope invites you to challenge your own perceived place in space and time. 

The Cosmoscope exhibition launch is on the 2nd of March at 7PM. Afterwards, the exhibition will be open from 11AM to 5PM every weekend throughout March 2024.

Curatorial team: Sara Atanasiu, Imogen Garfinkel, Katie Patient

St Bride’s Day Feast