Rehearsing Re_Club at Retrofit House

Re_ Club is a new way to come together to repair, reuse, reimagine, resist, rejoice, restore and more in 2026 as we go into a new chapter for the design and construction of Neighbourhood Public Square and Retrofit House.
For many years now, we have been in practice together, regularly gathering to exchange skills, knowledge, and wisdom across many generations, cultures, and walks of life; from the first Trade School classes at Impact Hub Birmingham, to Site As A Classroom activities in our beloved polytunnel in the Neighbourhood Public Square courtyard.
Starting this year, Re_ Club aims to brings together the best of shared practices around care, repair, creativity and connection in our homes, streets and neighbourhoods, and explore how they can unlock more possibility, more relationships, and more life for the land, materials and people that make up our places.
With welcoming shared spaces and hands-on workshops, Re_ Club aims to spark our imaginations while addressing everyday practical needs, making the most of the materials we have, the many languages and ways of knowing around us, as well as dreaming far beyond the here and now too; joining the dots—stitch by stich, conversation by conversation, coffee by coffee—for how we might get there together.
Join us as we rehearse the many ways Re_ Club could be an expansive, relaxed, warm welcoming platform where many curiosities and experiences can feel at home together.
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• There will be a light meal from 4pm provided by Lola the Cafeboat, which will be vegetarian and nut free
• Practical sessions will start from 4.45pm, taking place throughout the house, across three storeys
• In these sessions, you will be learning with your neighbours, artists, local craftspeople and creative practitioners in hands on ways in small groups, such as mending clothes, caring for plants or mapping possibilities
• You can immerse yourself into one session, or explore any number of them during the evening, with the ability to drop in, test, and try different things
• Pong, one of our regular baristas will be joining us to share his love of coffee and will be happy to share blends and recipes
• Members of the CIVIC SQUARE team will be your hosts for the evening, and are there to help you navigate, answer any questions and make connections

If you are looking for a more open, social space to connect and catch up instead, our Neighbourhood Supper Club at Signing Tree is better suited for gathering over food, conversation, and find out more about progress for the Neighbourhood Public Square and Retrofit House sites, with accessible facilities and more space to move freely.
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• Due to the nature of Retrofit House as a Victorian terraced house, we kindly ask that you register your place before attending
• We will check you in via eventbrite upon arrival, as capacity in the house is limited and the safety and wellbeing of everyone attending is our number one priority
• If you arrive without registering, we cannot guarantee entry to Rehearsing Re_ Club, but will of course try and welcome you in if possible
• Tickets are limited to one per person. If things change and you're no longer able to attend, please cancel your ticket to allow someone else to visit this time around. We hope you'll come back in future when you're able to visit though!

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We've been lucky to work more deeply with a range of incredible practitioners over the last few years on site, from our neighbourhood, the wider city and beyond. Their practices and our learning together has shaped Re_ Club alongside us.
During these Rehearsing Re_Club evenings, there will be sessions from:

• Jasdeep Sandu (FORIJ) — exploring ecological relationships
• Natasha Taheem — exploring textile reuse and natural dyes
• Phil Russell — exploring household repairs
• Yejide Adeoye (YA Creates) — exploring jewellery and artisanal repairs
• With Nature in Mind — exploring ecological repair

For this month, these sessions will focus on tool literacy, with practitioners introducing and sharing the tools they use. Many of these can be found in our homes and places of learning, but may be unfamiliar to us. Together we'll discover how to use them in our everyday care and repair, meaning that, as Re_ Club begins more regularly in June, we can put this learning into action together with repair, reuse and reimagination projects.
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Before we begin practicing Re_ Club more regularly in June, these two rehearsal evenings are to test and try ways of coming together in this space in a new way together, and anything we need to tweak or design in together for this to happen well.
Particularly due to the nature of the Retrofit House site, it is important for us to respect our surroundings and our neighbours, and we invite you to rehearse this together.
So much has already changed and will continue to change during this phase of our organising, as we move into construction across multuple sites, and we invite you into a time of ongoing rehearsal, learning, caring, and adapting together.
As we rehearse Re_Club, the kinds of questions we invite you to explore with us are:

• How can we work together under one roof?
• How do we make space for each other and keep one another safe?
• How do we co-host this space together?
• How might we connect through a culture of care, repair, connection and creativity to prepare for the worst but design for our most hopeful futures together?

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Rehearsing Re_ Club will take place in and around the Retrofit House site at .
As we take early stewardship of Retrofit House together alongside our incredible neighbours, we are very committed and excited to keep the site as open as possible as a place of learning, demonstration and shared possibility throughout the design, retrofit works and collective stewardship ahead.
In order to make this work, it means recognising the limitations and opportunities of what it means for us to host in the house during the design and construction process:

• We regret that access into the house is not currently wheelchair accessible due to both the doorway raised above street level and a narrow entranceway
  
• Activities during Re_Club will take place across three storeys of the house, with steep stairs up to the first and second floor rooms, with no lift available
  
• The house is in the early stages of a strip out process, with flooring uneven in places and many features that need care and repair. Please ensure to navigate carefully
  
• The house has toilet facilities available on both the ground floor and first floor. The main toilet will be on the first floor and the ground floor toilet is available for neighbours with access requirements
  
• All children under 16 must be accompanied by an adult and supervised at all times
  
• Due to the limited space we are unable to accommodate buggies at the house

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Please be prepared to take an active co-stewardship role together, including:

• being patient and adaptable in taking care of yourself and being considerate of others, particularly at times when the house may become busy or feels crowded
• keeping corridors and walkways clear
• ensuring others have a plate of food before we receive second helpings
• looking out for younger and older visitors
  

and countless other ways we know you will show us in what it means to navigate the house with collective care and sensitivity to the needs and wellbeing of everyone
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Please be considerate and respectful of our neighbours at all times by acting with the shared understanding that you are visiting a house on a residential street. This includes:

• visiting Retrofit House by public transport and/or active travel wherever possible
• organising for drop offs in taxis or private cars only as needed, with no street parking available on Link Road or the surrounding streets
• not including any residents in photos or video without their explicit consent
• keeping noise to a respectful level, particularly if visiting Retrofit House in the evening

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Please treat the material library and other displays with care, and be advised not to touch the exposed materials of the house's built fabric. This is for your own safety and wellbeing, as well as ensuring future visitors can continue to enjoy and learn from these shared resources after you, over the longer term
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Please listen and respect any further care guidance shared by our team and practitioners on site, for whom your safety and the safety of others is the number one priority.

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Site As A Classroom is a long-term collective practice to ensure every phase of designing, building, repairing and stewarding our sites is an open, inclusive, and shared opportunity for learning together in our neighbourhood and beyond.
Our intention is for our team, neighbourhood, and wider national and industrial scales to learn from the ongoing demonstration through Neighbourhood Public Square and Retrofit House in real-time, as well as informing how we learn from what the site, ecoregion, neighbourhood, peers, and precedents can continue to teach us, without end.
As we move into the construction phase across our sites this year, Re_ Club will be just one part of a Site As A Classroom approach, and is an open invitation to bring the skills you have, your energy, and curiosity to help shape and co-produce this next phase of discovery and demonstration for the climate transition and retrofit of our homes, streets, and neighbourhoods.
Find out more: bit.ly/PublicSquareDesign

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We are starting to prototype at the intersections of reimagining retrofit for 3°C futures at the scale of our homes and streets through Retrofit House as a tangible demonstrator site, working alongside Dark Matter Labs and Material Cultures, asking what a common house for the street could look like.
3°C Neighbourhood calls for the resilience, adaptation and extension of existing buildings for the most effective use of resources, alongside other Reimagined Neighbourhood Fundamentals, all of which have application at the foundational scale of our homes and streets.

Through Retrofit Reimagined 2022, we outlined the scale of the challenge of retrofit, posed six shifts towards the broader opportunity for reimagination it requires of us, and threw open a warm invitation, acknowledging that there is a role for everyone to bring with them the tools and perspectives they already have.
The Retrofit Reimagined ecosystem of practice now continues in the form of three distinct demonstrator streets across three neighbourhood-based organisations — CIVIC SQUARE, Retrofit Balsall Heath and WeCanMake, alongside a cohort of street incubators from across the UK convened by National Retrofit Hub.
None of us have all the answers, so we need to build, test and try together. Together, we’re excited to be taking early steps for assets to be held within a street entity, starting where we are in our neighbourhood to take housing out of speculation and into common ownership and stewardship by the people who live there.
Whether your connection is through industry, funding, research, construction, artistry, rooted organising and/or everyday life, you are warmly welcome to join us along the journey ahead for Retrofit House, with a role for everyone, starting from where they are.
Explore more: bit.ly/RetrofitHouseCS

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