On Mare Street in London Fields there is a giant orange blob of a building. Second Home sticks out on the high street like an ill-advised contemporary sculpture in a rose garden. Inside this warren of small businesses is Build Up, a charity that gives underprivileged children a say in what their neighbourhoods look like.
Clad in corduroy overalls and an intentional beret, the receptionist leads me to a meeting room in the basement. The room is warm and inviting furnished with Eames chairs and wooden coffee tables. Build Up founder, Huan Rimington looks up from his phone, looking like he has a million things on his mind other than this interview. Dressed in all black, he’s tall, blond and wiry. Despite the austere appearance, he’s an expert in playground design: he worked on the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park playground, just an hour east of the office.
Over a cup of tea, I ask him how he came to have such stylish offices. “We came to Second Home in October,” Rimington said, leaning back in his chair. “We lost our workspace in Old Street in July and then we were kind of homeless over the summer, and then since October they have been kindly supporting us. We couldn’t afford to be here otherwise.”
Rimington’s nonprofit is held together by a shoestring budget, duct tape and the kindness of strangers. Founded six years ago by a construction company, Build Up has been teaching children how to design and construct their own playgrounds, and giving them some control over how their community looks and functions.Their latest project is Build Up Hackney, which opened a playground on Flanders Way this year.
The Flanders Way project came about because a youth and community worker called Luke Billingham spent two years writing a research report surveying 400 young people about growing up in Hackney. The report found that they didn’t feel involved in their communities or that they had any power to influence them. The Council saw the report and decided to hire Build Up to create opportunities for these children to have some control over their neighbourhoods. The nonprofit brainstormed with children from Hackney to design a new street and taught them how to build a new playground.
Mayor of Hackney, Philip Glanville, cut the ribbon on the project himself, and the council has been tasked to find Build Up funding for the next year. I asked Rimington where he was planning the new projects. He gave a little smile: “We have a list of about 30 sites and a shortlist of three to four which are likely candidates. We should be able to decide in the next three months.”
For the last decade Rimington has been using his architecture degree from the London Metropolitan University to help teach underprivileged communities how to build their own environments. He then spent his twenties working for different design nonprofits, building shelters in Nepal following an earthquake, and tackling Roma discrimination in Eastern Europe.
“In the building environment there’s no real example of what’s good already involving young people,” Rimington confided. “There’s no statutory provision or statutory rights for young people to have a say in anything, let alone the buildings in their community and the environment around them. Build Up Hackney is an example of how that could happen.”
When I asked him why Hackney, he said that it could have been anywhere. The report gave him the opportunity, but the organisation works across London. “We work where there’s need,” he said. “It’s a combination of communities that are in the 10% most deprived areas of the UK or if there’s another specific need or group of young people specifically like a group of refugees or migrants. We try and give people compelling opportunities and a say in how their communities are shaped.”
I asked him if he kept up with the children that worked on the projects. “It’s not something that we’ve done before, because we haven’t had time or money, but the funders are quite keen,” Rimington admits. “We’re setting ourselves up to do it for this year’s cohort onwards.” He’s hoping to include paid apprenticeships to Build Up within the next three years.
Rimington has big ambitions for the future. “Despite living in this wealthy city, that is not the experience for the young people that we work with, so it’s about our way of doing things becoming mainstream. It shouldn’t be a one-off project. It needs to be something that happens regularly. That way people can have a say and shape their local areas.”
He leans forward in his chair and claps his hands together. “This needs to happen everywhere. In terms of five years’ time? I would like this happening on every estate, every underserved community. It’s a bold aim, but there’s a lot of need and a lot of demand for our work.”
