Onlookers watching Ana's performance at The Amazing Thing That Happened With The Shopping Trolley Party, 21.04.2009
21st April 2009 @ 7pm
A little Background -
To celebrate the completion of our new floor, we hark back to early March & the Coachwerks Buildathon. It was on the 8th or 9th and around 18 people turned up to help out. Several weeks previously we'd lifted some of the boards covering the long pit, a left over from when the space was an actual coach works. General dissapointment ensued as we discovered it to be full of useless rubble. We kicked the board back down and changed our plans - we'd intended the pit to be storage.
For some months we'd been trying to decide what would be the best way to make the floor flat and in the end we decided to concrete it. Much preparation had to be done and we hit on the idea of using the rubble in the pit as hardcore - mostly to save us money, but it would also kill two birds with one stone.
Of course the idea was insane. We had no idea how deep the pit was, or how much material we'd have to move in order to make the pit useable as storage. It also looked like, after some preliminary tests, that there was too much soil mixed in with the rubble. It's have to be sifted, but how? Fast forward to the 8th. 18 people, not enough to do! I'd found a shopping trolley around the side of CW last October and it has since served a multitude of purposes, but none this insane, none this epic! Someone, suggested it may become the sieve through which our useful rubble may be extracted. And for a time, upon that strange and beautiful day, 18 lunatics undertood the sifting of what must have amounted to at least 10 tons if not more of horrible, dusty stuff, in order that we may have a lovely new floor.
People organised themselves into teams - some in the pit digging like crazy, others lifting the yellow buckets of mix onto the trolley, others shaking the trolley and picking out the stones, others barrowing the loose earth away to form a little mountain outside my house.
It was an extraordinary feat, only achievable by nutters, empassioned by the spirit of the thing. No one would have said it possible, but as the dinner gong came, the clatter of steel spades against the pit floor subsided along with the most impressively strange sound to happen at Coachwerks yet: the apocalyptic, gleaming metal frame of our shopping trolley - put through its paces.
Epilogue
In total we estimated that we laid 70 odd tons of material down over the last few weeks. The floor shimmers like a moon-light concrete sea. The dance floor is down, Coachwerks is go. Come celebrate with us!
