• LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    6 months ago

    No, I’m from the UK. There was an anarchist fed in London that ran a solidarity cafe at a gay club during the day, though eventually shifting to mostly zoom calls, but it closed because no one went there, probably because they just had Facebook and a mailing list and finding them organically online was almost impossible.

      • LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        6 months ago

        Odd tbh, the only flyers and stickers I saw was Snapchats for buying weed and the occasional TERF one.

        The only record store I saw was operated by two elderly men who seemed extremely irritated at the fact they had customers and especially me (store’s in Notting Hill), and low-balled harder than pawn stars (I needed money to get to work once so had the misfortune), they also seemed to be part of a chain.

        At speaker’s corner I def saw political orgs too, but it was either anti-vaxxers/anti-maskere or TERFs usually.

        I did find one cafe in Islington with pride flags, but there wasn’t anything besides that, certainly no “bulletin boards” and the coffee was the most disgusting swill I had, don’t think I’ve actually seen an independent book shop that wasn’t Waterstones or WHSmith in my 8 years living there.

        Only thing I saw close to a community centre was a mormon church, which was never open, but often had entertaining crazy spiceheads outside of it that would chase people down the street on occasion.

        I guess it depends on the area. I was also advised to look on Facebook, which is a good idea as I’ve never been on there before. Thanks for sharing your experiences.

        P.S. Btw just to avoid confusion in the future: “City of London” especially when capitalized in this way as a specific name is actually a bit different from “London”: it’s a district within London https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London semi-autonomously operated by the CoL Corporation, judging by you mentioning Speaker’s corner I think you meant just London https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/London which is the stuff around the City of London.

          • LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            6 months ago

            Yeah we def had. And Aaah fair enough about the City. I’ve not lived in the City, only in North London, for a long time quite close to Hyde Park so I’m pretty familiar with speaker’s corner.

            I do remember also seeing pro-Russian war protestors by Bayswater next to the Ukrainian protesters outside the Ruski embassy once. It was pretty funny because between both groups there were like 10 people total and most people just went around them silently ignoring them like typical Londoners about everything, occasionally granting them with a tut