Coin Street is a community-led success story – a development of homes and commerce on the south bank of the Thames which has demonstrated over a forty-year period that local creativity and control can enrich and enlarge the lives of the people who live and work there. At YoCo, we’ve long admired their vision and tenacity, and they were part of our Don’t Extract – Redistribute! Online event in 2023, with founding member Iain Tuckett delivering the keynote session.

This March saw the launch of a report on Coin Street’s success, which endeavoured to unpick the key components of “the Coin Street Model” and understand the features and qualities which led to such positive outcomes. Phil Bixby was lucky enough to be at the launch (along with our friends from Mayday Saxonvale in Frome) and to get a tour of Coin Street, along with an opportunity to share thinking with the report authors and some of Coin Street’s key people.

It’s been a bit quiet recently with a pause in YoCo open meetings, although some of you saw us last summer at the St.Barnabas Saturday tabletop events. This doesn’t mean nothing’s been happening however. Here’s a brief update ahead of what are intended to be more public, engaging times…

We spent a morning at the St.Barnabas Church table-top sale, asking the question “what makes home, home?” What is it about the place we live which makes it special, makes it ours, which goes beyond the bricks-and-mortar four walls? Lots of good conversations ensued, often prefaced by a wrinkled brow and “Oooo – never really thought…”. But the thoughts were good, when they came...

An end-of-placement round-up from YoCo’s visiting University of York, MA in Public History student, Molly Shaddix.

What is the human impact of what we do with YoCo? How does this help us shape what we say to others?

We’re holding an informal event for all YoCo members on Thursday 27 June, 6.30 pm, at Spark York. Whether you’ve been involved from the beginning, are new to YoCo or simply dip in and out, let’s work together to find the inspiration and the language. Read about why…

One of YoCo’s intentions is to create a neighbourhood where children play in the streets. We used our Community Plan for York Central to map out all of things that would make children playing in the street possible – from removal of cars to having eyes on the street from known adults through a mixture of economic activity and places to sit and spend time.

But in order for children and adults to play out in the streets, we also need some games to play!

At the Table Top sales YoCo is co-organizing with St Barnabas Church – and in collaboration with Heidi Moon – we’ll be asking any and all to delve back into memories (whether 50 years ago or last week) to share games and to play them live in the church grounds.

What games did you love? What games would you like to pass on?

One of the powerful things about the Table Top Sale is that it is – in a very everyday way – ‘taking back the economy’, in the words of feminist economists J.K. Gibson-Graham with Jenny Cameron and Stephen Healy. J.K. Gibson-Graham have long argued that while we too often accept ‘the economy’ as this external force that we have no control over, actually ‘our economy is the outcome of the decisions we make and the actions we take (Gibson-Graham et al, 2013, p. xiii). The hope Gibson-Graham’s work offers is that if we start to see the economy as something that we make through our everyday choices then we can take ‘economic matters into [our]… own hands to help create worlds that are socially and environmentally just’ (2013, p. xiii).

This project is about creating a complete history of the sites in York Central that are, at present, missing or under-detailed in the official narratives. This blog post is an introduction to the project written by Molly Shaddix, a Public History MA student at the Univesity of York.

We used our most recent Open Meeting in February to take a brief look back and an exciting look forward, finding ourselves on the threshold of big things and feeling the need to remind ourselves (and tell new members) how we got here - and what we’re currently working on.

Facilitated by Joanne Rule, YoCo ran a creative mapping exercise at Spark:York on 24th Jan 2024.

14 artists – all participants in York Open Studios – worked together to build a vision of how artists in York could share space, equipment and skills.

York Central offers potential for larger scale, shared equipment and workspace – which could make it possible for artists to work at larger artistic scale, at lower costs or in more collaborative or companiable ways.

In essence, YoCo’s approach to change is ‘Propose, Don’t Oppose’. We’re not entirely sure how that phrase emerged or who we nicked it from, but one of the people who helped shape YoCo – Rebecca Carr – used to have a Buckminster Fuller quote as her email signature ‘You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete’. So it may have evolved from there.

Monday 4th December saw an evening which combined a fascinating exploration of railway heritage brought back to life with YoCo’s 2024 AGM – one of those facts of life of being a constituted body, in YoCo’s case a Company Limited by Guarantee (CLG).

AGMs rarely get the pulse racing, but we made ours a celebration of a fascinating year and paired it with an illustrated talk by Tim Hedley-Jones, Director of the Railway Heritage Trust (and a York resident). The Trust has almost forty years’ experience of supporting organisations to restore and re-use our railway heritage from waiting rooms to water towers.

A guest blog by local artist Ealish Wilson, about the chances that come from saying yes, and the value of an incubator space when you start off in business.