Company Drinks

Company Drinks is art in the shape of a community enterprise, organized around a collective production cycle, from growing to picking, making, trading and reinvesting.

We use business as a means to practice and (re-)produce a new collective public space which welcomes complexity, contradiction, and difference. Economy is reclaimed as a cultural realm, and we counteract the dominant capitalist rational with inter-generational collectivizing and communing.

Company Drinks is rooted in the history of tens of thousands of working-class families from east London, who until the 1950ies, worked as seasonal hop-pickers in the nearby countryside. These “Hopping” days are remembered by many as a temporary matriarchy where economics meets feminine camaraderie; inner-city living connects with the rural, and social time is linked to collective making.

Company Drinks started in 2014 in the east London Borough of Barking & Dagenham, with the simple invitation to go picking again, but this time, people would keep what they pick and make their own drinks. Recent shifts in demographics (multi-ethnic society) and geography (no more clear rural-urban divides) are reflected in who goes picking today and where we go picking. Every year, more than 1200 locals come on trips to their urban neighbourhoods and nearby farms. An annual range of 20.000 drinks is produced and sold locally for £1 and in central London for £3.

Company Drinks is community-led, and desires translate into new activities, such as monthly hopping reminiscing afternoons, a growing club, communal Digesting Politics lunches and the newly opened Centre for Plausible Economies.