Amazing Althea and her Allen Key

In this episode, I speak to Rose Sinclair the co-curator of the Althea McNish exhibitions that is currently on in nearby Walthamstow. It is the first time, many of us get to appreciate what an influential designer Althea was - someone who lived 50 years among us on West Green Road. Althea, originally from Trinidad moved to London in the late 1950s and became an incredibly successful textile designer. We talk about the breadth of her work, the context of her work and her love of Ikea Tottenham.

exhibition website: https://www.wmgallery.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions-43/althea-mcnish-colour-is-mine/
Rose on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Dorcasstories
Rose's university page: https://www.gold.ac.uk/design/people/sinclair/
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Transcript

Jamila  0:10  
Hi I'm Jamila and anybody everybody Tottenham is a bi monthly podcast, introducing the good people of Tottenham to you.

And I am back. So Season Two of anybody, everybody Tottenham is starting today and I managed to interview quite a few people. So in September, rather than being a bimonthly podcast, I'm going to publish one episode a week, so there should be four enjoyable episodes. In today's episode, we're looking back at one of Tottenham greatest Althea McNish who was living here for over 50 years, and is one of Britain's greatest textile designers, but not very well known. So there's currently an exhibition going on in Walthamstow. I know a few of you have seen it already. If not, you've got 10 more days to visit. I hope you will feel as awestruck as me after this conversation with Rose. Enjoy it. Today on the pod, I am joined by Rose Sinclair, who is the CO curator of the current Althea McNish exhibition. Thank you for joining me, Rose.

Rose  1:36  
Oh, thank you for having me. Jamila. It's lovely to be here with you.

Jamila  1:41  
Okay, so rose, let's start off how did the exhibition come about and who is Althea?

Rose  1:48  
Okay, so the exhibition came about with a conversation with my co curator, my fellow co curator, Rowan Bain, who is the senior curator at the William Morris gallery in Walthamstow. She saw me give a talk at the Bruce Castle Museum in 2019, where I was doing a presentation about Althea and her creative genius being a creative genius. And after the end of the talk, she kind of came up to me and said, Would you be interested in doing an exhibition? And I kind of nonchalantly said, Yes, of course, not realizing what that actually meant. So this was about October time, October 2019.

Jamila  2:31  
But you already started to give a talk about Althea. So how did you

Rose  2:36  
I met Althea in 2017, and she came and gave a talk at Goldsmiths in 2- in March 2018, and it was about a piece that we'd found in our archives called Trinidad. And she came and gave a talk about her work, her life. And I was kind of just mesmerized about how this amazing black woman could have had this life in Textiles for over 50 years. And yet, there was no book about her, she was still just a chapter or abstracts or footnotes within this kind of broader design canon. And I teach design. I'm a lecturer in design at Goldsmiths, I teach design. And I'm also a specialist in textiles. And so I just became fascinated about her backstory. Also, this notion that within our design canon, I stand up in front of hundreds of students every year. And I am just fascinated by this backstory of how we can have these stories of design and not and not actually discuss /  talk about the absence of some of these famous designers. And so for me, I wanted to kind of understand her trajectory and story. And I met Althea. I've gone to meet Althea, several times with her husband, John. And by the end of the kind of the period of meeting her and her husband, John, they had actually said to me, would you be interested in writing Althea's biography? And, of course, who wouldn't? Who wouldn't be interested in that? And it gave me an opportunity to kind of do this, what I call a deep dive, a deep dive research, then her husband died. And then pandemic, Althea herself was was then taken into a home. And at that point, I wasn't quite sure what was going to happen. And then obviously, this opportunity to do our exhibition came along. And then I applied for a grant a research grant with the society of antiquaries and we got the grant. And it meant that I could then do I could concentrate on a three year research project all about Althea. At the same time, I was actually doing my PhD research about black women and crafting and how migration had impacted on this, what I call this black aesthetic of design, and how I felt that within the kind of within our history of design here in the UK, there wasn't Caribbean influence on the aesthetics of design within the UK. But we kind of miss we haven't really talked about it

Just on a side note, because the podcast listeners won't won't see you. You are a black woman yourself. So what was your experience on your design courses? So because I was wondering, so if it was a similar situation or maybe even worse for Althea when she came in the 1950s to London?

she wouldn't have seen anybody else. She, she might have met other black professionals. But she would not have necessarily met other black designers. And we see this in some of the photographs that we've seen in the archive in the exhibition because she, she, she did a lot of photographs. She took a lot of photographs, and she photographed her family life. She photographed her social life. So we can see the people that she socialized with. So she had a very had an active social life with lots of different types of people. She came from a black middle class family, so they actually socialized with a lot of people that migrated at the same time as them. So they had an active social life. So (she was), we were able to see what her life was like. She actually showed us her student life as well. Student Life at art college, her student life, traveling around Europe, her student life around London, so we're actually able to see her in art college at the time. And she was the only - there was another black male student, but not another black female student.

Jamila  6:28  
Where did her confidence come from to be such a trailblazer?

Rose  6:34  
On things you've got to understand she came here when she was like in her mid 20s, so already a very confident she was born in 1924, she arrived here in 1950. She was a confident young woman. And you've got to realize she already had her art background when she arrived here. She had won a scholarship to come here to study. So she already she  she had a really good education. She had a really good, she had a really good confident social circle. She was she was already - she wasn't a teenager. She was a confident young woman, she knew what she wanted, she had actually won a scholarship to study architecture. So I mean, that's not that's no mean feat to to go to architectural school. And one of the things that she said in her..., she said in interviews was that she didn't want to go to architecture school because she just felt like it's a man's job. She didn't just didn't want it to do. So she actually swapped, she swapped courses and decided to go to the the Central School of printing. And that's what changed her career. This notion of swapping from architecture to Central School of printing.

Jamila  7:38  
I mean, she had a little bit of a connection through her mom to textiles.

Rose  7:43  
She says her mom was a fashion designer, or in fashion. Some people might call it her mom being a seamstress or designer, but her mom was into making clothes, what we might see as a kind of a home dressmaking thing, her mom was into tailored clothing. And you can see we have to look back at what how clothing was made back in the 1950s. As opposed to the kind of the home dressmaking crafting stuff that we have today. Totally different. It was about tailoring clothes to suit yourself because remember that the notion of going and buying off the shelf was still a very limited access point. It was still very new going and buying off the shelf. Many people would actually have learned those skills of being able to tailor clothing to suit your body and to suit your shape. And lots of we found from her archive that lots of Althea's clothing was actually tailored to suit her. So she says she had clothes made for her ,many of the fabrics that she had designed that she designed.

Jamila  8:43  
What is because it's part of your research, what is this connection of the Caribbean and textile art and women working together? The Dorcas club? What is the Dorcas club?

Rose  8:59  
So Dorcas is a character in the Bible in the New Testament and Acts chapter nine. And in that in a very short couple of lines of verses, it talks about the charity of this lady called Dorcas who took in women that were destitute, and took them to be makers of cloth to enable them to actually make to be able them to actually feed themselves and their families. If we fast forward. And then during that time, she became known for her charity, that notion of charity taking the destitute, giving them sustenance, sustenance, food, etc. But actually also giving them the opportunity to pick themselves up and to make something of themselves. She dies. She gets raised from the dead, and she glorifies God. That's the kind of crux of the story. We fast forward 2000 years, if you like to 17 to the end of the 17th century, early 18th century, and we find women again, migrating themselves from rural communities to urban communities, but also upper class middle class women saying well, how can we help these women that are moving into the industrial (?), and there's a philanthropy movement emerging about charity, so Women Helping Women, and they're saying, Who can we model ourselves after. And you see, the rise of what we call the Dorcas societies

Jamila  10:22  
is that in the UK, or in the Caribbean?

Rose  10:25  
That's in in the UK, it migrates to the Caribbean, through the Missionary Society. And you see them coming up through and you and I found this through newspapers. So you see the rise of Dorcas societies, and you see them in Canada, in America and Africa, and India, in China, and they migrate. And they operate on this notion of charity. And so you see the rise of the use of cloth as a way of creating charity spaces. When we come to the 1950s, I'm paraphrasing here, when we come to the 1950s, we see that Caribbean women migrating to the UK, use the Dorcas societies and Dorcas clubs as a way of communicating and connecting through their networks. And they use cloth again, as this charity space. So they make clothes, they raise money for charities, they create communities. So they raise money within their communities, to actually establish themselves and work together to help in their local communities, but also send money back home to help and to sustain their communities back home.

Jamila  11:29  
That makes sense. And was - do you know, Althea was she part or her mother part of the Dorcas club? Or did she find her own tribes in other ways?

Rose  11:43  
I think what Althea and I don't know whether or not they were part of those kinds of communities. But what I do know is that Althea was part of other extended communities, I know that she did a lot of work within educational spaces, because she was very passionate about the education, education within our communities, education of people, the education of young people, especially, she was really passionate about how education could actually change your life. It was mostly about design education. She was very, she was very passionate about how design education, good design education was very essential. She worked a lot within the kind of spaces of Carnival, she did a lot within the Design Council. She did a lot of mentoring of young people, young designers, she did a lot of charity work, she actually visited a lot of schools. She did a lot of that for free. She was  very, she so much loved going into schools and passing on what she had learned.

Jamila  12:40  
But it's interesting isn't I just read yesterday, how design is taking a backseat again, in the GCSE choice that the numbers are just going down that it's not seen as worthwhile, the creative subject and those kinds of subjects.

Rose  12:58  
I think that I think there's two things going on, I think there's the thing of taking up the creative space within schools, I think that's that's a policy decision that's going on about the value of those creative subjects where they sit within education. And that's been going on for a number of years. And we see that those subjects that take up spaces as some people like to see and they don't see them as adding value, seem to be on the demise. Yet we see that in the social world, that the value of craft in terms of mental health, in terms of social engagement in terms of finding space and finding time to do other things is on the rise yet we still need people to be plumbers to be wood craft workers to be builders where to learn those skills, if they don't start doing them in school, if they don't start engaging with them? And they don't start problem solving. If they don't start. If we don't have those subjects in school - when do they start learning them? The creative skills, this creative skill and creative thinking doesn't start when you leave school at 18. It has to start at primary school level that problem solving is is not just a creative skill, it's a skill that you need. It's a life skill. And I think that's one of the things that Althea recognized and one of the things that we found in her archive which I found really intriguing. She had art in her from an early age from like three or four so she could do art before she could write. And we found that when she was like a teenager, she would work with a local priest, she would go and catch she said to to go beg, for whatever art materials from anywhere that she could and she had worked with a local priest in local villages to teach children art because she believed that art was for everybody. So for me, she did what she did. She was into community work. Yeah. So this notion of how art is is for everybody and at a community work it kind of takes you beyond it just being for the elites and that was one of the things that she believed in. I mean if you look at the work within the Trinidadian art movement that was in Trinidad, one of the things that we, that we found out was that art in Trinidad had this thing of being just like embroidery. You did it as a pastime. And with the evolvement of the Trinidadian art movement, it was about art for everybody. Art was not just for the elite, it was for everybody. And I think we're moving into that into this notion of design in school is just for those becomes just for those for the elite. And out in the social world, it becomes something else. It's a it's a pastime. 

Jamila  15:37  
Okay, so let's talk about why Althea is so significant, because she also I feel like she became successful really quickly.

Rose  15:49  
Well, she got taken up by Zika Asha, who was a famous fashion entrepreneur. So her work went straight into things like into the Haute Couture end of the market. So her designs were then seen on Guy Laroche work on Dior, ??? So all of these kind of design icons, her work was then seen in those spaces. Then, obviously, her work got taken up by Liberty's. One of the things that we found in newspaper clippings was that initially, her work was actually used for furnishings for Liberty's. And there was a really interesting newspaper clipping that said, the women are coming into our stores, but they're not using the furnishing fabrics or furnishings, they're using these amazing designs for clothing. And it's the work of Althea McNish. And then we see the shift from furnishings into fashion fabrics. What lots of people don't know is that she also designed scarves for Liberty's. So her success, she was dressing the female body, and she was dressing from head to toe, basically, and the home. And you got to understand that in 1950s, and 1960s, a lot of black people being told to go back to where you belong, or housing was being seen no Irish, no blacks, no dogs, but you have all of this kind of social context behind you. And yeah, here was a black woman dressing our homes and our interiors and our bodies. So this dichotomy, isn't it, but this notion of on one hand, been told to go back home and not do this. And then on the other hand, here's this woman, as she dresses in these luxurious and fabrics. And you go, Whoa, this is this is like amazing. Then in 1962, she wins, she wins this amazing bursary to go around Europe, and actually look at what other technologies are driving British design. So that to me, that is like blowing my mind away. And then in 1963, she gets heralded in vogue. So she's, she's in vogue, June 1963, she is in vogue, being heralded as a new face of design

Jamila  17:52  
Has Althea spoken about the racism at the time or not?

Rose  17:57  
She said there was racism, but she ignored it. And I understand I get where she's coming from. Yes, I'm black. And I was born here. But I'm of Jamaican heritage, and I'm, I didn't get to Jamaica to like till 1990. And the first thing I said, when I traveled there was I got off the plane. And I said to my husband who was with me at the time, and I said, Everybody's black. I've never seen that before. I've never been to a space where everybody around me was the same color as me. And that changes you mentally that changes you. It changes you inside, there's something that clicks with you about what it is to go into a space and everybody is the same as you. And you come back with a different mentality. It changes it your perception of yourself, your understanding of where you fit in the world. And I think she knew where she fitted in the world. She knew what the world was like. And she said it. She knew it existed. But she didn't have to dwell on it. It wasn't the - Racism was not the center of her space. What her space was, was designing art and doing her job well. She said if you dwelt on that she couldn't do her job. So she knew - it was a bit like she said she had to do a presentation in 1960 to 63. She walked into a space. She was the only, she said I was the only woman and it was 200 men dressed, it (was) 200 white men dressed in grey suits. And she was dressed in color. And she said she was so nervous. And then another woman joined her, another woman joins and then she said right you can get on with it now Althea. So this notion of she knew she was the only black woman in the space but she just said she was the only woman rather than she was the only black person so she knew her... She knew what it was like to be the only black person but she she said she didn't... She said that it was always there and the words that she left with me - she said "I opened the doors for others to follow."

Jamila  19:57  
Do you know much about Althea and her connection to Tottenham because she was living like until the end she was living in Haringey and Muswell Hill at the end, but on West Green Road for 50 years, but why? Why was she so in love ...

Rose  20:12  
Her parents lived in that area, or that's where they moved to. So she was, she always lived in that side of London from when they moved to England.

Jamila  20:23  
 And also interesting because she was in an interracial relationship at the time. That was, that was quite unusual as well.

Rose  20:31  
Well, her parents actually when they took in migrants The thing about their house the reason they bought their house was because they had a studio on the top floor. So the houses in that side of London, were actually really big. Althea had a studio, because of the windows were massive. She had her studio was in the house, so she didn't actually have a separate studio elsewhere. Her studio was in the house. So that was one of the reasons for having the house on West Green Road, right because of the windows in the studio. But her parents, her husband, John was Jewish. And her parents when she was younger, took in Hasidic Jews, helped them, supported them. For her she didn't -again, she didn't see any. She didn't see that as an issue.

Jamila  21:15  
Interesting with the Hasidic Jewish community because again, it's very much in Tottenham. Okay, let's brag a little bit about your exhibition. It has been really, really well received. So what's the current numbers of visitors?

Rose  21:30  
I think when I spoke to the gallery they were hitting 10,000 11,000 visitors a month, something like that?

Jamila  21:37  
So what do you think it is? Do you think there is just a hunger for these stories to be told? Or do you think it's because of Althea? It's just like her designs are just so beautiful?

Rose  21:50  
I think it's a mixture of storytelling. I think it's a mixture of the layout. I think it's a mixture of seeing this amazing designer and her story and her influence and the fact that she that so many people knew of her work, and mean Eduardo Palozzi was one of her mentors, Edward Bawden, Hugh Casson, Shirley Craven, (Sandra Rose?) all these people that she influences, but also when you look at her work, it's almost like an instant instantaneous recognition. There'll be people that bought her fabrics, there'll be people that remember seeing her fabrics in their houses, there'll be people that were dressed in her fabrics, the fact that Liberty is a name synonymous with great design, reissued 12 of her designs, you can go and buy her work. You can go and buy her fabrics for the first time in 50 years. So there was a contemporariness about her, you can go into the Liberty store and go and buy her fabric, and go and be dressed in her fabric. Again, everybody can engage with knowing about her. If you went to the tate before our show opened, you could go and see her work situated amongst Great British artists and designers. So this notion that she's always she's always existed, makes her also relevant. For the first time you saw the breadth of her work, or the fact that she was designing for ocean going ships with the skill of designing for this plastic for the Oceania for the Oriana, or the fact that she worked with her husband, John and did prototyping for advanced passenger trains. Or she was into this notion of sustainability with the paper dresses and the fashion world and terylene twel (??). All that she did big paintings on canvases, or she was filmed by the Central Office of Information. And these films went around the world about her design work, or that she was filmed with Tony Hart, the famous artists designer. An artist that we all watched on TV when we were little, doing all this artwork, and she actually did a film with him. And he wrote a book and she's featured in the book about her artwork, and you go, Gosh, this woman was doing stuff. This is the breadth of what she was doing. This is how she was lauded. And been able to bring out those stories and then see her work close up. And I think the thing that people like is that they can go close up to the artwork, they can go close up to the textiles. I've been to the exhibition and people have come up to me and and kind of said they love it. They love the storytelling. They love they love the fact that they can walk up to the textiles or they feel that now they now understand the designer or they think, why didn't we know about her before they go in and then somebody said to me, I feel like I've been bathed in sunshine. When they walk into the space. I think I think it's the thing that we're telling the story. You walk around the gallery and there are pictures of her. And I think my favorite one is as you walk up the stairs as you're going up to the first floor. There's a picture that meets you as you go to the first floor and she's holding a Crayola crayon and she's drawing onto a canvas. So the simplicity of the materials that she uses to create these fantastic designs. Work from Crayola crayon, to acetate to mono printing to - it's like, she just uses everything and anything to create these fantastic designs. 

Jamila  25:12  
You know, like when you met her - I mean she was very old and did she still do things like creatively?

Rose  25:19  
she was still drawing when she was ninety - I think she was 93 when I met her she didn't seem like 93 because we would always meet in ikea in Tottenham

Jamila  25:29  
Oh yeah, it's closing at the end of this month.

Rose  25:31  
She loved the ikea and she loved the lemon cake in ikea. We would always meet, she would always have lemon cake. And she just loved looking - the colors would fascinate her and the room layouts. She'd always say to me, you need to dress in color. She didn't like me dressed in black and white, she'd say you need to dress in color. And she always carried on allen key. She always had an allen key on her I don't know if you know about screenprinting. But on screen printing, when you put the screen manual screens on a table, if you want to align them you have an allen key that you have to put into the to lock the screens in place when you're printing. And she would go around and she was telling me she would go around if she didn't think the screens were aligned properly, she would go around and adjust them behind the technicians because she knew - she was technically astute. And she knew how the screen should be aligned for her designs, because that's what she learned all those many years ago. So she knew how to design just because she would often print her own designs as well.

Jamila  26:28  
Did she go back to Trinidad later on?

Rose  26:32  
We know that she went to Trinidad in 1962, because she did an exhibition called color is ours. And she took 162 of her artworks with her. So even in 1962, she had a body of work that she was able to display in Trinidad. And she did a series of talks about what she'd already achieved since she graduated in 1957. So between 1957 and 1962, she she'd already amassed 162 works.

Jamila  27:02  
So those people were interested in this whole topic area. Are there any other books or films that you can recommend for people to look into?

Rose  27:13  
If you're gonna look at the Caribbean artists movement then look at the Anne Walmsley book on Caribbean artists movement, because that I think is probably one of the best books to kind of - if you want to understand the Caribbean artists movement and its kind of legacy in history, then Anne Walmsley, who was a member of the Caribbean artists movement did, has done that book. If you want to kind of think about it in a more kind of context now. Then, there's a book called liberation begins in the imagination, which is a more contemporary take on Caribbean art. And that's a really kind of good one. So sorry, liberation begins in the imagination, Caribbean writings on Caribbean British art. That's by David A. Bailey. I'd read that in terms of where you can find chapter heading chapter readings on how to like I said right at the beginning, she is in book chapter. So you've got women in design. There are art books with chatting with chat of her or a page on her obviously, Christine Checinska, who's the curator at the v&a did a really good special issue in one of the journal in the coach(??) in the textile journal on her. Built in Britannia, which does has got a really good chapter in on her. There's a really good craft magazine in 2005 did a really good article on her called Caribbean Blaze 

Jamila  27:13  
But basically you have to write that book!

Rose  27:30  
The book will be out in 2024. Because that will be her 100th birthday. So that's why I am aiming to do the book as part of this research project. 

Jamila  28:45  
Will there be photos hopefully?

Rose  28:48  
There will be photos it will be it will be totally illustrated can't have a book without illustrations,  and pictures and her textiles. Yeah.

Jamila  28:58  
So what has been your biggest surprise?

Rose  29:03  
the biggest things was the kind of the fashion side, her work on terylene twirl in, for instance. But the the amazing work that she did with this, it's her eye for color, and this notion of how she she was uncompromising in her approach, but also her tenacity. But I think for me, it was the work that she did, even in 1966 reading about how she was encouraging British manufacturers to rethink things around sustainability and new approaches to manufacturing with with cloth and with fabric and with paper. So she was talking about sustainability and sustainable practices and approaches to manufacturing in 1966. And we think that this is new. So she was already she had this edge of thinking ahead 40 odd years ago, 50 odd years ago, we think that this is new. So there's this notion of how of how she was she had this different voice or different head of technological thinking but also a head of a futuristic approach. And we found this when when we were looking at how many times she'd done the ideal home exhibition, for instance, though she decided she designed like, the bachelor girls room, and she was she 

Jamila  30:17  
because that's the one you've got any exhibition No?

Rose  30:20  
 Yeah. So in the exhibition, we've had a futuristic recreation of the bachelor girls room that she designed in 1966, at the ideal home exhibition, which was, interestingly, the first ideal home exhibition that was filmed in color by the BBC. So think about this, that room created by a black woman is then beamed into millions of British homes on TV in color in 1966. So that, for me was like, That blew my mind as well. But she went on to do another one with where she bought over the carnival costumes from Trinidad that were on show it was called Fiesta in I think it was 1968 69. And then she did another one on the futuristic room of children. So with her husband, John, they created a futuristic room showing a child's toy room from mid 1840s, all the way to 2008 in the 1970s. So this notion of how  she was thinking about futuristic thinking. And then she was actually in the 1980s beginning of the 1980s we found she was actually dabbling in the first initial computer printing software for textiles. So she was even in the 1980s. She was already dabbling in New Tech. She was still looking at new technologies and new thinking and design. She taught so many places. So we know that she taught at Central Saint Martins. We know that she taught at Hornsey at walthamstow at Canterbury. She She sat on so many different boards of different different things as well. And one of the surprising things as we know that she taught Freddie Mercury of Queen at Hornsey fashion. Wow. That's, and that was from one of her former students who I interviewed. And she said, Oh, yeah, Freddie Mercury was on our course as well. Oh, that's a Freddie Mercury of Queen? Yeah. That was a that was one that made me laugh.

That was lovely. Thank you so much. Anything else do you feel we need to mention?

Well the exhibition is until the 11th of September, so people still have time to see it. But the great news is, if you haven't if you miss it, and you want to travel up north, the exhibition will be opening at the Whitworth in Manchester on the 22nd of October. And we'll run through to the 23rd of April 2023. So if you miss it in London, you can have a special trip up to Manchester to see it. What people will see when they come to Manchester, for instance, well, you'll actually see wallpaper in lengths, which we don't have at the show in in Walthamstow, but they'll be able to see some lengths of wallpapers that we that we've been able to find.

Jamila  33:08  
So another reason for people who have already seen it to travel. 

Rose  33:13  
Travel up to Manchester, but yeah, an amazing woman and amazing designer. And what it also does, it draws out the other amazing artists that work with her. S In Manchester, we're able to expand on some of the Caribbean artists that she worked with, exhibited alongside it's amazing just to think about her as a professional black woman. And I think one of the things that the pictures show is her as a professional black woman doing design and art. And I think it allows teachers now in school to be able to show a professional black woman doing textiles at a time when you didn't have other pictures. But now they can actually say well actually, here's an example of a professional black woman alongside all those other artists that they ever show or talk about and they can see her work. They've got an example now of what her designs look like. And so well, it's been great to see the school parties go around. I've been there when the school when school children have gone around, and they get excited. So it's really nice when you go there and the students are walking around and their sketchbooks and so on. So it's lovely to see that inspiration from the students as well.

Jamila  35:20  
Okay, so thank you so much for this interview. 

Rose  35:22  
Thank you. All right. Bye. 

Jamila  35:25  
So after this interview, I was like, Surely there must be a blue plaque for Althea in the neighborhood. So I googled it. And I found that No, not yet. But a local primary school Earlsmead, has been looking into this for over a year and they say that there has been some movement. So hopefully, we will get to be proud and loud about this soon as well. You know how much I love West Green Road so I can't wait to have one there. On the website, I will write the blog post about Althea and will link in information about some of the designers that Rose mentioned because I had to look them up or didn't know all these names. And also I will put in the top tips, the book recommendations that got mentioned. I hope that is going to be interesting for anyone who wants to read more about it. Also any kind of articles that have come out. Okay, so we love to learn we continue our learning journey afterwards. Have a good day everyone. I hope you enjoyed today's episode, learned something new, and let that Tottenham love grow. Take care. And until next time, bye

Transcribed by https://otter.ai