Ferdia Carr finds that Hackney’s hacking collective fills a gap in his life.
‘This is the vending machine,’ our tour guide tells us. ‘It came to us broken and it’ll probably stay that way, but it’s a symbol of eternal optimism.’
Located on Hackney Road, London Hackspace is a collective of geeks, hackers and engineers – all eyeing the bright side of post-industrial life.
It’s another Open Tuesday and I am part of a small group which is being shown around the place.
Deep in the basement, past the biohacking lab and the wood and metal workshops, we’re introduced to Hackspace’s very own industrial robotic arm. It’s plugged into three computers, and two guys in hoodies are clacking away at them. ‘The code it came with is a bit tedious,’ they explain, ‘so we’re writing new code over it.’
Just like that (next stop: astrophysics).
But what, in any event, does one do with an industrial robotic arm?
‘It’s far more precise than either of our 3D printers,’ our guide chimes back in. ‘The hope is we can attach a head and turn it into a giant 3D printer.’
I don’t doubt it. They know what they’re about, these guys. They only got the arm because a local university ditched it when the £4000 cable broke – and they managed to replace it for the princely sum of £300.
London Hackspace prides itself on being an open ended collective. While there are a small number of trustees, you’ll never meet anyone ‘in charge’. Members take joint responsibility for maintaining and developing the organisation. The recommended membership rate is £20 a month, to help pay the bills and stop the lot from falling prey to developers. But if you’re strapped for cash, you can sign up for as little as £5 a month. Once registered, any magnetic swipe – Oyster or otherwise – will get you in the building, 24 hours a day.
In line with the cooperative ethos, anything from the vast library of fascinating junk is available for anyone to use. In return you give back what you can, whether it is specialist knowledge, general help or perhaps another piece of fascinating junk, like a broken vending machine. The sacrosanct exception is anything with a DNH sticker, which means ‘DO NOT HACK’. Visitors are warned of naïve newcomers who brought in precious machine parts without labelling them DNH, only to have them torn to bits by piranha-like prospectors hungry for spares.
Looking around at the creations it is cluttered with, Hackspace feels like the place you always wished for when you were a kid. On one table a group of guys test out a quadro-copter attached with oculus rift, piloted by its proud builder. In the other corner, men in tell-tale IT attire demonstrate ‘the beast’ – an old arcade machine rejuvenated with custom made games. To my absolute glee there was, in the parking space out back, a caravan converted into a space flight simulator.
If coding and electronics isn’t your thing, there are other activities. I saw two people standing by the in-house laser cutter, watching intently as it carved out an array of lock picks from a sheet of steel. I was assured that their weekly lock picking workshop is entirely for recreational purposes.
I wanted to get involved in the brewing group that convenes somewhere in the basement, but I couldn’t track them down. I like to think were too busy sampling their work. The mind hacking group was absent too, probably off bending spoons.
In a city that worships money, creating something for its own sake is a refreshing novelty. The one thread running through the many lives of Hackspace is that everyone seems genuinely in love with what they’re doing.