Emma Warren’s Document Your Culture is a guide to preserving vital grassroots venues and creative spaces

“Stories about basements, youth clubs, co-ops, squatters or roller skate spots can create an evolving blueprint.”

Writer and publisher Emma Warren has created a new pamphlet and audiobook guide on how to document culture, community and spaces.

Called Document Your Culture, the pamphlet argues for the preservation of grassroots venues and other creative spaces — and features practical guidance on how to maintain these important sites in a post-Coronavirus world.

“Stories about basements, youth clubs, co-ops, squatters or roller skate spots can create an evolving blueprint. We can use that blueprint to open up possibility: to hang out together and dance, protest, make music, or just spend time in the resurfacing art of dossing,” reads an extract from the book.

Across its 36 pages, Document Your Culture brings together questions, observations, a ‘how to…’ guide, and photography, further developing and exploring ideas from Warren’s Document Your Culture talks and workshops delivered between spring 2019 and lockdowns this year.

Document Your Culture has been designed as a companion piece to Warren’s 2019 book Make Some Space, which focused on east London’s Total Refreshment Centre as an incubator of the capital’s thriving jazz scene.

Warren is also offering free copies of both the print and audiobook version to youth groups — contact her on Twitter for more information.

Head here to purchase a copy of Document Your Culture, and check out the Brian O’Tuama-designed cover below.