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Billed as the Slack Space Opening Party, Saturday evening in Sunny Colch soon became something of an urban explorers wet dream. Free to roam the empty caverns that make up the considerable space at Victoria Place, the party became not only a celebration, but also a pyscho-geogrpahic babble of an evening into the hyperlocal division of labour in Sunny Colch come the turn of the Century.

That’s the 21st Century, Comrades.

Located in the old East of England Co-op HQ at Eld Lane, Slack Space now has the opportunity to use the empty three floor old office block as something more than an exhibition space, as is the case with Queen Street.

But the very ethos of the organisation means that performance is always going to play a part, which is why when entering Eld Lane, you walk straight into the old cashiers banking area, now transformed into an arena for the arts.

Cash from chaos, n’a ll that, Comrades.

Ladybird and the Larks were entertaining the locals when we arrived on Saturday evening, singing, strumming and strutting their stuff, somewhere roundabouts where the rope guidance system would have been when you were paying in your small change.

The old Co-op clock was keeping a tight watch on the running order for the evening; the wooden paneling of the cashier’s frontage made for a majestic stage backdrop. Spotting artifacts from the forgotten era when the building was once home to a business would become a familiar theme for the evening.

Word soon went around that it was Open House evening. All the doors, passageways corridors were accessible - all that is but the oak paneled Board Room. The East of England Co-op may subscribe to a more acceptable form of capitalism, but it didn’t stop the suits from installing two doors to the inner sanctum of co-operative boardroom business.

What was striking about the freeform exploration was exactly how the physical working practice of a large, bureaucratic organisation has changed over the past decade. The open plan style that is now something of a style accessory for most white-collar paper clip shufflers was as absent as the once heard office gossip that surrounded these walls.

Instead the Co-operative co-opted private offices, closed doors and a secondary chamber for the secretary to provide a gatekeeper role. It was all very Reggie Perrin, with oak paneled offices, and even a dumb waiter to service the G & T’s come 4:45 on a Friday afternoon.

Slack Space has inherited a shell of a building where all the life has been stripped out of it, but some of the infrastructure remains. Grand desks provide social commentary on the status of each ghost office worker. Social media has yet to be discovered, with clunky telephones [get you!] still lining the desks.

My exploration party wandered around each corner, each time coming across a relic of past working practices that was a reminder as to why none of us now run around in the rat race. The only reminder of real life was to be found on a single desk, which was now decorated with postcards from office colleagues, boasting of sun, sea, and sex during some two-week Spanish escape from Sunny Colch.

Which you were here, honey.

It was like a scene from 28 Days Later - I half expected to find a white collar drone still shredding in the back office of the top floor, oblivious to the fact that the Co-op has now moved on and the building is home to a different form of cultural economy.

There is of course some nice symmetry in the old Co-operative now housing Slack Space. For all the double-doored boardrooms and phallic defining leather chairs, the Co-op is comprised of rather nice people. It has a rich history of folk working together, to try and gain a collective benefit.

Which was precisely what drew a crowd to Eld Lane on Saturday evening, to plan, speculate and celebrate what might lay ahead for Slack Space in Sunny Colch.

I came across an old Japanese World War Two fighter pilot as I made my way along another distant corridor on my way to the Gents. I hadn’t the heart to tell the geezer that it was all over and that he should come out waving the white flag.

Turns out he was a performance artist and that Slack Space was his new play space.

I think I’ve just been co-opted.

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