Dampbusters! Cosy Homes x Mystery Theatre Club
We talk a lot about what it means to live well. To have a roof over your head. To have a cosy home. To have a hot meal and find spaces to gather with your community. These are really basic needs yet we still find ourselves fighting for them on the daily.
The Cosy Homes Club is a group of local people who are working together to do this, because we believe everyone deserves a warm and healthy home. We have long term ambitions for a community-led retrofit scheme, and as a first step are trying to understand what people think about housing and energy efficiency.
When working with our brilliant group of Cosy Homes Club Energy Champions, we discussed how we wanted to get information about energy efficiency out into our community. Two of our champions, Helen and Colin, had the great idea of creating a piece of community theatre.
Homebaked CLT has a history with the theatre. Who remembers Homebaked: The Musical at the Royal Court? Or our Anfield Home Tour? Theatre is in our blood and has shaped the blueprints of a lot of our work. Was there an example we could look to for inspiration?
Homebaked CLT team member Josh Coates also runs a local ‘Mystery Theatre Club’ at Kitty’s Launderette, and immediately saw the connection between his love of theatre with the work of the Cosy Homes Club. Researching the depths of the internet, he found ‘Dampbusters!’, a community play created by Easthall Theatre Group. The play responds to what residents saw as their own ‘culture’: the penicillium and aspergillus moulds growing on the walls of their flats, and was performed around Glasgow during the City of Culture in 1990 to raise awareness of the health risks inherent in damp housing.
Last week, Josh’s ‘Mystery Theatre Club’ and the Homebaked CLT Cosy Homes Club invited local residents down to Kitty’s Laundrette to watch this piece of theatre on the big screen. The wonderful Fish Wife, a local supper club, provided some lovely vegan scran and board member Anthony provided brews to the sold out crowd.
We sat and watched the piece (which you can watch here) and spent time discussing as a group the similarities between Glasgow in 1990 and Anfield in 2024.
Below are some of the comments that came from our discussion. Who better to speak for Anfield than the people of Anfield!
“You could literally pick that up, put it in Liverpool in 2024 and it would be the exact same play”
“[The issue is] not listening to the people of the area and that's what you could say about Anfield as well. You're told what they want you to do rather than asking people what they want.”
“I think a lot of the problem is these prepaid metres. They pay more than anything. The amount of money that you have to pay to feed these metres. No wonder people can't heat their homes.”
“I lived in a council house. I had a very big issue when it comes to mould. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know my rights or what I needed to do. Then I kept reporting to the council. I believe I wasn't the only one … When you talk to people, there's some similar complaints.”
“ What happens when immigrants don't understand the system, don't understand [their] rights, the things you need to do. The council and the housing association, even private landlords tend to take advantage of us”
“If you're looking at the Victorian properties, they're more difficult to retrofit to [the standard] you need. That probably increases people's bills and not knowing how to access help for that.”
Despite seemingly little progress since the 1990s, we ended our conversation with a growing sense of solidarity, that we’re not alone in this struggle, and that working together is the way to create lasting change that can benefit us all.
As a group of Energy Champions we meet regularly and if you want to join the conversation than please email josh.coates@homebaked.org.uk
