Twelve hours in Hamilton House

The Canteen on Stokes Croft evokes hazy memories of edifying toilet graffiti, good wholesome food, eclectic live music, and a smoking area where posh punters and eccentric locals mix. It’s the forward-facing part of Hamilton House, and perhaps the only one you know, unless you are a student of the teachers of African drumming, dance, yoga, and more who ply their trade on the floor above.

But the Canteen and the two dance studios are just a small part of a much larger organism that, although invisible from the street, pulses with life: 93 artists studios, a bike workshop, an art workshop, a screen printing studio, 30 offices, 39 co-working desks and two meeting rooms, on top of five wellbeing studios offering massages and mindfulness sessions, and a kitchen for various cookery classes.

How can you possibly write about everything that goes on there? Well, we figured, the only way was to spend twelve hours there. Only then could you really get your teeth stuck into the huge hive of activity hidden behind the building’s front. Without leaving. Without ceasing to explore. Without seeing daylight.

Here’s what happened.

09:45 A weekend in London involving a terrorist attack and a break-up, plus a late-night coach to Bristol and a delayed bus to Stokes Croft the morning after, leaves me walking through the doors of Hamilton House a slightly broken human. It feels as if someone else (my editor) signed me up for a marathon and I haven’t done my training.

10:00 I’m warmly greeted, whisked to the community kitchen and aproned for my first stop off: Cooking & Conversation, a chance for refugees to learn English while cooking up meals from their native lands and learning about health, nutrition and NHS services along the way.

BME communities underuse the NHS, as many of them are unaware of the free services available to them, while issues like FGM make women disinclined to visit doctors. It is against this background that Claudia, the session leader, encourages discussion about essential nutrients and hands out leaflets about dentists and doctors, all over the loving preparation of food. At the end of the 8 week course, the students will receive an ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) certificate from the City of Bristol.

On the day of my visit the menu is masterminded by Manuela, who is from the coast of Ecuador and therefore a little disappointed that she has to make her coconut fish stew vegetarian. But with so many different cultures represented, there are inevitably some restrictions. Koos and Sahra, from Somaliland, are both observing Ramadan, but nonetheless join in to help Manuela slice up plantain then smash, refry and salt them to make patacones.

Masjid, from Iran, is in charge of the encocado de verduras, while Ario, also from Iran, sternly stirs some rice. I soon become aware that I’ve joined the class soon after a heated discussion about the best way to cook rice, unsurprising in a room where over five cultures and four continents are present. After limited help from me, we sit down to feast, while Claudia encourages conversation from the class participants. As we move on to the dessert course, another plantain-rich dish of torta de maqueño, we listen contentedly as Masjid voices his strong opinions about putting yogurt on top of cake.

Frying the plantain

Laying the table

Patacones with coriander and a beetroot and chilli sauce

Grub’s up

11:58 In an unfortunate episode that nevertheless served to highlight the kindness of the team behind Hamilton House, I realise I’ve lost my mobile and headphones. I run back to the Canteen toilets where I last had them, then to reception. My headphones are thankfully in the lost property box, but no new iPhone to be seen. I borrow someone else’s and, during the course of my increasingly desperate search, recruit around seven unwaveringly helpful people on various floors of Hamilton House, journeying to a pub and a neighbouring supermarket, on the run after the dot that claims to be my phone’s location. Defeated, back in the office, still fielding encouraging comments from everyone around me, the GPS signal eventually leads me to my backpack where my phone had been hiding all along.

12:30 Embarrassed and glad of an opportunity to escape, I go down to the public exhibition which is on the same floor as the Canteen. The exhibition charts the journey of Coexist, the management team behind Hamilton House, from when they opened for business 9 years ago until now, when they are fighting to buy the building from the building’s owners, Connolly & Callaghan (C&C). This is their second bid for the building, and it’s a beautifully illustrated labour of love, focused around the building’s successes so far and plans for the future. Hamilton House’s members generate £21 million in turnover and support over 1260 jobs, serving 3555 clients and customers a year. But Coexist dream bigger than that, with social justice and sustainability high on the agenda, as shown by the plans to build the UK’s first rooftop eco-hostel and a community microgrid to generate their own power.

Coexist’s second bid for Hamilton House

Social justice and sustainability

Vox pops from the people

13:15 Heading back to the community kitchen, I am greeted by a wonderful sight: Year 1 children raising clouds of flour as they clap their hands from the pure excitement of learning how to make scones and pasties. The moment is surpassed only by their chants of “push it forward, puuuull it back!” as they knead the dough. Much like the refugees I met earlier, the class from Dolphin School are going on a trip around the world to taste different cuisines week by week. When asked where they had been the last two weeks, they shout “India!” and “Egypt!” excitedly. Now we’re in the UK, specifically Cornwall, and I’m damned impressed that these tiny kids can recognise a ear of corn when it’s shown to them, plus they know it’s ground into flour. It’s a far cry from the kids that tend to be featured on Jamie Oliver’s programmes. They are also definitely better at baking than me. Although I don’t smile weirdly as I slip balls of dough into my pocket.

13:45 Leaping up the stairs to one of the uppermost floors, it’s then time to sit in on a poetry session with Misfits Theatre, a performing arts company for people with learning difficulties. They are kept busy, they tell me, with events like a poetry reading last September in a tunnel they redecorated in the Bearpit, and daily training covering music, movement, acting and poetry. We go around the circle: Berry and Paul both read poems about what makes them happy; for Paul this is mainly hip hop and his favourite artist, Flo Rida. We move round the circle to Rachel, who reads her empowering poem about being sexy and sweet in a quiet but sure voice, then to Dan who shows off with a wonderfully theatrical delivery. Lastly, there’s Phil, who has some downright fun revelling in what I come to realise is his trademark graphic imagery. But the discussion veers off course multiple times, orbiting surrealist topics such as who would win in a fight between Poseidon and another ruler of the sea, who is the biggest, happiest person in the world and America, and the recipe for making convincing fake bird poo. It’s testament to the fact the session is a chance to explore any of the doors in their minds, wherever they might lead.

We agreed to do some serious poses…

Phil’s poem “Freedom”

14:00 Wednesday is bring a cake day in the office. I have timed this article correctly. Also, freelancers, take note: bare feet and naps on the sofa are encouraged here.

15:00 I am tempted away from cake and chats with the office’s hotdeskers by the promise of a massage in the incense-infused Wellbeing Centre, which Coexist are hoping to move to the ground floor for better accessibility. There, I meet Nealy, a holistic and ayuryogic masseuse who has heritage in India, where she trained. After a thorough consultation about my lifestyle and needs (tense shoulders, cyclist’s hamstrings, and a long weekend drowning my sorrows), I get my kit off, have my pants deftly pulled down, and enjoy an hour of utter bliss.

Nealy prepares for the session

17:00 If my sleep-deprived eyelids were heavy before the massage, I’m really in trouble now. But suddenly there’s a schedule rejig, and I’m left with some free time. Blood sugar beginning to dip, and with the prospect of hula hooping at 8.30pm on the horizon, I go down to the Canteen, bump into some friends, and flop down next them in a state of post-massage bliss. That Big Issue guy that everyone knows passes through the smoking area a few times, bumping fists with the punters and berating them for not parting with £2.50 for a magazine. Business as usual in the Canteen. When the kitchen opens, I order a huge meal of socca, heritage tomato salad, braised asparagus, ewe’s curd and a side of fries. The person sitting next to me asks what I ordered because, to be fair, it looked and tasted amazing. My only critique – and the fault my own – is that it’s made me late for African drumming.

18:07 Rather wishing I had arrived on time, I enter a room where a circle of people are drumming hypnotically, some clearly deep in a trance, a candle burning in the centre. Feeling out of place, I shuffle over to a spare drum and start hitting it dubiously, but I’m unable to hear what noises I’m making above the din. Nearly all faces bear the same blissful expression, save for a few fellow bemused ones, and I realise it’s a diverse group of people. It would be easy to imagine this class to be homogenous, but there are bare feet, Doc Martens, Adidas trainers and Converses hugging the bases of the waist-height drums. This, I realise, is the trick to preventing them from slipping out from between your knees, because they must be tipped forward to let the sound reverberate. Suddenly everything seems to be going a lot better.

After 15 minutes and several encouraging smiles from Kirby, the session leader, I feel my hands beginning to fall into place on the beat, even as she begins to push us with more difficult rhythms. After 30, I’m swaying with the movement of my arms as if it’s Saturday night at WOMAD and I, too, am wearing African print parachute pants. The variety of drums, and other percussive instruments, introduce so many different tones that it sounds like a choir. After 45, I’m beginning to feel the meditative and uplifting effects promised to me, although it might be that I’m just beginning to digest my dinner. But I’ve stopped thinking about what my hands are doing; in fact, I’ve stopped thinking at all, and it feels really good. When time’s up, I feel reinvigorated and energised, and grab Kirby for a chat.

She’s a big name in Hamilton House, as the co-founder of DMAC (Dance Music Arts Collective), one of the first tenants in the then-derelict building who built the two dance studios with their bare hands. She describes the drumming sessions as the heartbeat of Hamilton House, which correlates with what everyone else has told me. She is from London, but had her first grounding in drumming in Jamaica, then studied in Ghana and Gambia, and learnt Afro-Cuban drumming from a Sri Lankan in Manchester. The popularity of her sessions is evergreen, she assures me, but they do change tack with the seasons: in winter, it’s incense and candlelight, a darker affair than the bubbly, fun summer session I just witnessed.

Welcome to the circle

19:00 Much as the drumming energised me, I’ve found an armchair and I’m not able to leave it. And, while waiting for my hula hoop class to begin, some evidence surfaces that I’m beginning to lose the plot.

Help me

20:30 Nick is a hula hoop instructor who’s not quite sure how he got there. He began cheerfully upending stereotypes in the female-dominated sport via a PGCE in History after an ex-girlfriend got him into it, and then he “never really stopped.”

Duly warned that I might have bruised hands in the morning, we begin warming up, stretching, and practising things that involve a lot more hula-hoop-on-the-hands in what I ignorantly thought would be a hula-hoop-on-the-waist affair. There’s not very many of us in the class, but it does make perfect sense: festival season is upon us, meaning everyone who knows how to hula hoop is doing it in parks in the sunshine, or at festivals surrounded by wasted teenagers.

Thanks to Nick’s quips and enthusiasm, and fun, cheesy tunes featuring Michael Jackson on the stereo, it’s a fine way to wind down the day. We learn a short routine involving classic moves like the Moustache and the Revolving Door which I will make sure to showcase to my friends at every festival I’m going to this summer until they beg me to stop.

Hoops

Hooping

21:45 Reader, how I’d love to tell you that after hula hooping I propped up the bar and befriended a bunch of regulars in the Canteen; how while watching the Celtic band playing there, I knocked back pint after pint of Ashton Press telling fantastic anecdotes to a circle of listeners until a final whiskey at 1am before staggering home (like my editor told me to). But alas, it wasn’t meant to be. After a cursory glance at the band in the now-dimmed Canteen, I head back out through the doors of Hamilton House, desperate to sleep but lighter in step and spirit, my faith in humanity restored, and much less of a broken human than I came in as.