I Knead You Tonight... Homebaked, Anfield

Homebaked, the community-run bakery and land trust in north Liverpool and a legacy of Liverpool Biennial's 2012 public realm commissioning programme, seems to be going strong. We talk to Sue Humphreys and Jeanne van Heeswijk to find out what's what

Feature by Sacha Waldron | 29 Jul 2014

‘Murder Alley’ as some used to call it (officially known as Tunnage Square Passage) connects Wolstenholme Square to Duke Street in Liverpool. The underpass is slightly dodgy, the place for after-club stabbings. Graffiti lines the walls and the floor is covered by patches of fire damage. Something, however, glitters. Tiny flecks of glass are set in a sparkling white carpet throughout the underpass. The glass comes from Mexico and was collected by Teresa Margolles from city crime scenes where drug-war victims had been shot in their cars. This public realm work was commissioned for Liverpool Biennial in 2006 and now goes largely un-noticed by the city’s population, becoming part of the fabric of the city.

Liverpool Biennial has always been known for the quality of its public realm commissions but often these artworks are temporary, disappearing after the festival. A few remain, in various states of upkeep, activity and visibility; Penelope by Jorge Pardo (2002) is now a lit-up nightspot for seagulls in Wolstenholme Square. Antony Gormley’s iron men (Another Place, launched 2004-5) are still the main attraction on Crosby beach. Richard Wilson’s Turning the Place Over, a giant oval cut into the old Yate’s Wine Lodge façade opposite Moorfields (2007-8) has stopped revolving and now looks like someone has drawn a black outline shape on to the building.

Some public realm commissions, however, have a rather different trajectory. In 2012, Jeanne van Heeswijk was commissioned by the Biennial to initiate a project in north Liverpool. Heeswijk is known for her socially engaged work that often takes the form of constructing events, situations or meeting points that address issues like town planning, cities, environment and community.

Heeswijk began a conversation with residents, asking them to reimagine the future of their neighbourhood. Anfield, Everton and Breckfield were and are subject to housing clearance and renewal schemes that were initiated by the Labour government in the late 90s. At the height of the UK property boom the government identified areas that were subject to ‘market failure’, planning a course of action called Housing Market Renewal (HMR). They began buying up resident’s houses or imposing Compulsory Purchase Orders (CPO) with a view to demolition and the building of more commercially viable housing. Once properties were empty they were boarded up, left to await their rubbly fate. In Everton/Anfield, Liverpool Football Club (LFC) also decided it needed to expand and began buying houses in the vicinity of Anfield stadium, often offering residents lower than market value. To add injury to injury, LFC couldn’t decide where they wanted their new stadium to be, leaving houses empty unnecessarily. Meanwhile, the government ran out of Housing Market Renewal money, leaving neighbourhoods half empty, whole streets boarded up like a ghost town, businesses shut. Those that could, got out, those that were left behind were stuck.

Heeswijk’s project, 2Up 2Down, invited groups of local residents to work on how they could take back control of the situation. Inviting architects, urbanists and artists, she ran a series of workshops in thinking about how residents could play an active part in the decision-making processes being imposed on them. She organised a group of young residents as an architectural/design firm taking the local community as their ‘client’. Architects like URBED came and worked with the groups to remodel a row of houses in the area, working out of a local building, Mitchell’s Bakery, which had been forced to close in 2010 but had been an Anfield institution since it had opened 100 years previously. Over the course of the 2Up 2Down sessions, participating groups found that locals would keep coming into the old bakery asking if it was going to re-open. Jeanne and the 2Up 2Down participants decided to run with the idea. They created designs and models about how the bakery should look and function. Alongside their projects around housing, the bakery became just as important. These were two elements of the same necessary community infrastructure.

At this point, Heeswijk’s commission began to snowball, turning into a project so much bigger than anyone intended or could have imagined. 2Up 2Down morphed into Homebaked, as it is now known, and is split into two key areas – the development of a community cooperative bakery and the formation of a Community Land Trust (CLT), a legal entity that allows a community to acquire and co-own land.


"You should be able to see the bakers at work. It's like theatre" – Sue Humphreys


Today, there is a core group of local residents and stakeholders in the two strands of Homebaked, including those who were originally part of 2Up 2Down as well as those from the Biennial and Heeswijk herself. “Over time, the group of people involved has become much bigger,” says Heeswijk, “although we have some people who were involved from the beginning, there is almost a completely new set of people steering the project. That’s a good thing. It took a while for people to believe that the project was really happening and was going to continue to happen. So now as we grow and expand more people come on board.”

Some residents got on board rather unintentionally. Sue Humphreys had been retired for three years when a flyer came through her door asking if she was interested in DIY or baking. ‘If so,’ it said, ‘come to the old Mitchell’s Bakery on Tuesday morning for coffee.’ “I thought, Great!” says Humphreys. “I love baking. I turned up and saw the state of the Mitchell’s building, it needed a lot of work, and realised I wasn’t going to be baking any time soon.” Humphreys returned to the next meeting (with a cake) and became a regular.

Along with fellow residents, several artist-residents like Jessica Doyle (now working as a baker at Homebaked Bakery) and Britt Jurgensen, who has taken over a lot of Homebaked’s online presence, the group decided, with the support of Heeswijk and Liverpool Biennial, to rent the building from the Mitchell family and see if they could run it as a cooperative. They wrote a business plan and started to refurbish. The space was opened up to create a light and airy café with the kitchens in full view. “The feeling was that you should be able to see the bakers at work,” says Humphreys, “like it was theatre, you could see everything that was going on.”

The bakery, however, needed an oven. In November 2012, Homebaked launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise £13,000 for a bread oven and by January 2013 had raised five thousand pounds in excess of that. The Homebaked Bakery opened in Autumn 2013 selling breads, sandwiches and coffee alongside an array of pies to both locals and the regular match-going punters. The bakery, however, was not just a shop, bakery or commercial enterprise. The emphasis was on economic sustainability but also on providing a space for ideas and conversation. “It’s important that the bakery fulfils something other than just being a shop and a bakery,” says Humphreys. “There’s much more to it in the way of community conversation.” This intention has a relationship to the project’s origins as a contemporary art commission and its engagement with those creative discussions. “It’s important to remember that Homebaked came out of a particular train of thought and positioning,” says Heeswijk. “The whole project speaks about the relationship between ethics and aesthetics and comes from a discourse about that, from a position of art in thinking about civic space in a different way, about space and spatial relationships and what that means. All of that should and does stay alive in Homebaked.”

Just when things were going so well, Homebaked faced a major setback. The oven was in, the bakery up and running, then the council announced that after all that, the building would be demolished. “That was a big shock,” says Heeswijk, “but it led to some interesting conversations and in the end, turned out to be a positive thing because some people then really picked up the struggle.”

“At that moment,” says Humphreys, “we just had to decide that, ‘Yes, we would go for it.’ We realised that if we didn’t make a stand we just have to walk away. Nobody wanted to do that. The council offered us another unit in the new build that was coming but it was clear to us that we didn’t want that. That wasn’t the point. Homebaked is as much part of preserving a little part of the history of the area, it’s also about the actual building. We felt preserving a history of the struggle was important and that by saving Mitchell’s we had saved at least one thing from the community from being destroyed.”

It’s a good thing they stuck it out as now the demolition order has been lifted again: “hopefully we’re here to stay,” says Humphreys. The bakery has just gone through renovation and has now expanded to almost double its size, allowing for a training kitchen and community space. They have just received funding to renovate the space above the bakery as accommodation and are hoping the council will gift them land adjacent to the bakery so they can start with some bigger building plans through the CLT. One major move forward has also been the appointment of a dedicated (and funded) project manager who can push the land side of Homebaked forward.

Jeanne van Heeswijk is still on the board and involved in planning but for her, the success of Homebaked as an artwork, as a commission, is that it now functions completely autonomously without her. “I always hope that the names of my projects are more known than me. I would love that, and I think with Homebaked that’s true”

For Sue Humphrey, the project was never just about the politics, the bakery or the CLT, it was about the opportunity it represented and finding hope in the future of the area. Of course, the social aspect is a very important factor too. “For me,” she says, “although I’ve lived in this area all my life, I think I’ve got more friends now through working with the bakery, the CLT and the Biennial than I’ve ever had before”. The icing on the cake (sorry) is that, recently, she eventually got to bake in the Homebaked Bakery. “Finally!” she says. “It only took about two and a half years!” What kind of cake was it? “I can’t even remember,” she laughs. And why should she? There have been a lot of other things to focus her attention on and, as Homebaked continues onward and upward, there will be many cakes to come.

Homebaked Bakery is open six days a week. Monday to Friday, 8am-4.30pm, Saturday 10am-5pm

http://www.homebaked.org.uk