The Whitehall Park living advent calendar, 2017. Photograph: Courtesy of the residents of Whitehall ParkUsing real windows in a concerted local campaign to mark the Christmas countdown can harness huge amounts of goodwill, as our writer discovered for himselfby Jamie DowardWe had artistic differences. And, as the clock ticked down to the big reveal, when we would remove the tarpaulin and present the world with a bewitching snowscape that wouldn’t seem out of place in a John Lewis advert, the differences festered. We pushed back and forth, my wife and I, arguing over what to do.
It was December 2016 and we’d been in our house just three days. It was dawning upon us that the decision to participate in a local community art project, when homes in our area transformed their front windows into a “living advent calendar”, may have been a rash one. We’d seen what other homes had done when it was their reveal date. The bar seemed pretty high.
To my mind, our window lacked illumination, and its bleak midwinter scene was, well, just too bleak. With five minutes to spare, we added some stars, more lights and a couple of foam cut-out stags bought from a pound shop. We decked the tree in our front garden with flickering electric tea lights. And then, suddenly, something bordering on the miraculous happened.
Our small corner of Archway, north London, was turned into something that, true, would not give Oxford Street a run for its money, but still held the gaze, and brought smiles from onlookers. OK, the music system failed to blare out the meticulously chosen Holocene by Bon Iver when the tarpaulin dropped. And the eight bottles of prosecco we’d bought for the 40-strong throng who collected outside our house for the pavement party – an integral part of such unveilings – evaporated quickly in the cold night air.
But it was wonderful, truly wonderful. We felt connected to our neighbours. We felt that most elusive of things: a sense of community.
This Christmas we won’t be taking part in what will be the fifth Whitehall Park Living Advent Calendar project. We’d expected that having a two-month-old daughter would keep our hands full. But, in the end, she just wasn’t strong enough, and so the room we were converting for her nursery, like our front window, will remain dark.
But we’ll go to as many window openings as we can. Because these were the neighbours who carried us when we stumbled, who bought us books of poetry and flowers and sent cards and messages to say we were in their thoughts. They were ballast in choppy waters.
At a time when politicians on all sides are conspiring to drive us ever further apart, we need these connections now more than ever. And it was this, the search for community, that convinced Dr Amy Pollard, director of the Mental Health Collective, to start the project.
Pollard grew up in a cul-de-sac in Bristol and remembers how the carol singing outside each home was an essential part of her Christmas, which turned neighbours into friends or, in her case, a husband. She wondered if she could feel something similar when she moved with her family to London, and hit on the living advent calendar project, an idea that first gained popularity in Sweden. Pollard’s Mental Health Collective created a website that offers advice on how communities can develop their own calendars. Since then, its work has been promoted by educational charity the Eden Project and inspired similar projects in Manchester, Walthamstow, Weston-Super-Mare, Norwich and Somerset.
“I’ve done a lot of community organising in my time but I’ve never done something that has delivered such a strong, consistent and universal reception,” Pollard said. “People say it creates a magical, warm feeling. After we had a load of stabbings, people said it made them feel safer, gave them a nice, positive answer to the question: what kind of neighbourhood are we living in?”
It’s noticeable how the project has become a mirror for our times. After the Paris attacks, several homes transformed their windows into Eiffel Towers that melded with the universal peace symbol. One window was transformed into a tribute to George Michael (pictured above with the rest of the 2017 calendar). Many windows display doves.
Organising a calendar may seem daunting. Pollard had similar thoughts in 2016, after she had been sectioned as an in-patient in a mother-and-baby unit. She reached out to friends from church who helped her organise the first calendar. “We divvied it up and did it together. The fact that I could lead the coordination of that project while sectioned with an eight-month-old baby tells you all you need to know about how easy it is.”
Even if a community can’t find 24 participants, it shouldn’t be deterred, Pollard said. “It would be easy to say, ‘we have failed if we haven’t got 24 windows.’ That’s not the way to look at it. Take a playful spirit to it, know you can’t fail. Christmas is happening anyway. It’s about taking something that is happening and bringing out the loveliness of it to the fullest extent.”
As we discovered, some nerves will be shredded on the big night. “Sometimes people get into a flap, worrying whether they’ve got the right shade of glitter, or about the translucency of their snowman,” Pollard said. “It’s similar to the Great British Bake Off – there’s decoration-related anxiety, but almost always on the night everyone feels really proud.”
And, it is to be hoped, more connected, to others and themselves.
“Organising the project was good for my mental health,” Pollard said. “My confidence had been knocked and I was asking the question: do I bring any value to the world, is there any point to this? Even if it’s only a small contribution, to make a community art project like this, it gave me a sense of being useful, that I was welcome in my community.”
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