The Movement Café: the first step in a major project.

The ambitious mixed-use and high sustainability scheme for the transformation of a former Greenwich industrial estate, close to the city centre, starts with “The Movement Café”: a temporary space commissioned by the developers, Cathedral Group and designed by British artist and designer, Morag Myerscough.



Located in the corner of a former industrial estate, currently undergoing redevelopment, The Movement Café was built in just sixteen days, just in time for the opening of the Olympics. The Café is expected to operate for around six months.



The colourful construction is the gateway to the Olympic borough. The developers wanted to ensure that the first thing to greet visitors to the Olympics was a welcoming place with a strong visua narrative, rather than a building site. Construction on the site for the new eco-efficient estate is due to be complete in autumn 2014.



The café is the result of a public art collaboration between Morag Myerscough and the olympic poet and prolific tweeter Lemn Sissay, whose poem about Greenwich, Shipping Good, is painted on the hoarding that wraps the site next o the café.



The Movement Café is run by the Greenwich Co-Operative Development Agency, a local not-for-profit organisation that works with disadvantaged communities across London promoting food growing projects and sells a range of organic, fair-trade, sustainable, locally-sourced food and drink.



A public art project that encourages a forward-looking sustainable local lifestyle where the mixed-use scheme gives everyone a feeling that they belong to a vibrant community.





And what better than a meeting place like The Movement Café reach out and get the message across?



Project: Morag Myerscough (artist and designer), http://www.supergrouplondon.co.uk, Lemn Sissay (poet) http://www.lemnsissay.com/
Client: Cathedral Group, http://www.cathedralgroup.com/
Year: 2012
Location: Greenwich, London, UK
Photos: Gareth Gardner, Image of the hoarding with the sailors by Dominic Dorin,
Images of the “making of”: Courtesy Morag Myerscough