The location of the Social Centre can now be announced:
Pisgah House Road in Broomhill, S10 5BJ
You can take a number 52 bus from the centre of town to just past Broomhill at Hoole Road and it’s a two minute walk from there.
The social centre is a non-hierarchical, anti-capitalist space based on a number of core principles which reflect the world its organisers want to see: co-operation and mutual aid, openness and inclusion, voluntary participation and shared responsibility.
It is a place where discrimination of any kind is challenged in order to create as inclusive a place as possible. One way of achieving this will be through open meetings using consensus decision-making, which happen every other day at 10am to decide how the centre operates, with the first one of these happening on Thursday October the 1st.
A programme of workshops, discussions, and other events is planned for the first fortnight. The full timetable can be found on the Events page and anyone is welcome to propose things they’d like to organise in the social centre by emailing info@sheffieldsocialcentre.org.uk, calling 07729575582, or by visiting the centre.
“We’ve established this space for people to openly discuss and learn from each other about issues of social and environmental justice, because there’s a chronic lack of public space in which people can come together and freely and genuinely talk about the things they are concerned about, and take action together to change them. The only real way of addressing the problems of our society is for us all to realise the power we possess when we act co-operatively, and helping people to make that realisation is one of our main goals in setting up this social centre”.
The building being occupied, Pisgah House, is on the same site as the Tapton Experimental Gardens, both of which are owned by the University of Sheffield. In 2007 local residents defeated a planning application by property developers Miller Homes to demolish all of the buildings on the site.
The last decent social centre we had was Matilda, but that was evicted in summer 2006 by the ironically named ‘Yorkshire Forward.’
For events for the first 2 weeks and a map, look at http://sheffieldsocialcentre.org.uk/