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

 

Sunday 15th 7.30pm. Torriano Poetry. Gboyega Odubanjo and Joe Carrick Varty introduced by Lisa Kelly

 

A Sunday reading in the late 1980s

Ágnes Hay: Dancing letters

Exhibition of creative lettering, all December.

Michael Wedgwood

A Torriano benefit

Blue Blouse

Sat 14 Dec 7.30 for 8pm
The New Factory of the Eccentric Actor present Blue Blouse . A performance inspired by 1920s Soviet agitprop. With seasonal jollity and refreshments. Collection: lots of money in the hat please!

The Blue Blouse (Синяя блуза) theatre troupe were an influential agitprop theatre collective in the Soviet Union, created by Boris Yuzhanin under the auspices of the Moscow Institute of Journalism. They were an important theatre movement, now long forgotten. They thrived between 1923 and 1927, when they merged with the Workers Youth Theatre.

At the time of their disappearance the Blue Blouse movement had 5,000 companies with more than 100,000 members across the Soviet Union.

Edmund Prestwich and Ian Pople

Sunday 3rd November Torriano Poetry, 7.30pm. £5/4.

Guest poets Edmund Prestwich and Ian Pople.

Edmund Prestwich was brought up in South Africa and came to England at fifteen. He studied English at both Oxford and Cambridge and is now a teacher at Manchester Grammar School. His poems are peopled equally by people from South Africa and Greece (or Cyprus). Publications include Their Mountain Mother (Hearing Eye, illustrated by Emily Johns) and Through the Window (Rockingham Press).

Ian Pople was born in Ipswich. He was educated at the British Council, Athens and the Universities of Aston and Manchester. His first book of poetry, The Glass Enclosure, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. His second collection, An Occasional Lean-to, was published by Arc in 2004. Saving Spaces was published by Arc in 2011. He teaches at the University of Manchester.

Readers from the floor welcome.

Médecins Sans Frontières fundraiser

A sale of original textiles, framed photographs and cards by Ruth Ingram

Saturday 12th, and l9th October 2.30. – 6.p.m. and Sunday 13th, and 20th October 2.30 – 6.p.m.

All purchased items can be taken away immediately. Prices between £10 – £ 35 (cash or cheques)

Launch of poetry pamphlet, Travelling Light, by Frances Galleymore

Saturday October 12th, 6-8pm

Long-time resident of Highgate, Frances Galleymore was a professional writer all her adult life, producing novels, short stories, reviews, television scripts, screenplays and, from 2006, poetry. In September this year, two years after her death in June 2017, she will be in print again, as a pamphlet of some of her work is published by Poetry Salzburg under the title Travelling Light, the poems selected and edited by fellow poets Isabel Galleymore – Frances’s niece – and Fred Beake.

Copies of the collection will be on sale, and there will be readings by Isabel, Fred and other poets of note. Frances was a member of Highgate Poets until leaving London in 2013; another Highgate Poet, Norbert Hirschhorn, describes how, with Travelling Light,

“Frances … takes us by the hand through the thickets and ambushes of life with a tender lyricism, magical, sometimes even funny.” Robert Peake declares that “In the brief time we are given, one could do far worse than to journey so lightly, yet so keenly aware, as she has done throughout these poems.”

Admission to the event is free. A place can be reserved by registering with Eventbrite:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/launch-of-frances-galleymores-travelling-light-tickets-71246549347