Perous Secret Diary - Keep Out: October 05, 2012

i am complete

a little abridged history.

finally, after several months of troubling perou inc. has returned to london after 6yrs in the wilderness

for those of you who don't know already, we were in hackney wick (first) before the olympics and converted a derelict victorian factory into our studio and family home.
6 years of renovations later, just as i was thinking the place was finally perfect and that we would never leave, we returned home from holiday one day to handwritten note on our gate telling us we were going to be compulsory purchased by the LDA.

it wasn't exactly olympic related: more a dodgy bank-handed property scam...too long and boring now to go into again.

after a year of severe depression and fighting the order as hard as i could, i relocated the family to this old farm in far-east kent.

our place was demolished, the garden dug up and the road was renamed.
there is NO trace of us ever having been there.
5 gypsy bungalows were built in the perou factory's place, for gypsies rehoused out of the olympic village (for now)

i'm not sad to have moved the family to the countryside.
and i've been in and out of london, commuting up and down the a2/m2 every week.
but i have been missing a london base: staying in hotels, feeling like a tourist and renting other people's hire studios to work

so we've bought another light industrial ruin, just around the corner from the last place.

the last place was 'THE PEROU FACTORY' in homage to the industrious andy warhol and as a place where we made 'PEROU'

the new place will be called 'perou's BOW BUNKER' because we will be fortified and it will be a place you go to lock down in and be creative.
PEROUINC is at war: this is our military headquarters.

these kinds of buildings rarely come on the market for sale
but there was an agent marketing this one, with some really bad photographs.
and fortuitously the agent couldn't reach the vendor to tell him that people were interested in seeing it, as he was MIA in india

i managed to track him down (in india) with some amateur detective work and emailed him to express an interest.
by the time he was back in the uk, his short term lease at the unit had been busted for running a weed factory there.
the inhabitants were caught with £180,000 of pot growing in pots.

when the police raided, they smashed the place up.
when the friends of the arrested pot growers came back for anything they'd left behind, they smashed the place up.

when the friends of the arrested pot-growers came back again they smashed the place up again.

when i first saw the inside of the building i thought it was going to be too small.
there was a false ceiling throughout the main room and it was cut into four smaller rooms.
it was VERY hard to visualise the space.
especially by torchlight as the electrics had been stripped out.

after all the time and trouble of finding the vendor and waiting for him to be back in blighty, i was sad to say to him 'sorry: it's just not right for what i need'

after a week of worrying that maybe it could work and after seeing my friends gala and sean's new second floor, i reconsidered and told the vendor i had changed my mind.

three weeks ago we exchanged (and paid a 10% deposit) and the vendor casually said that we might as well start work.
(especially as i was the only person with keys now: as i had new locks put on after the last break (back) in).

so we started work: full force.
and now finally, yesterday, after much trouble for my friend and property solicitor james, we have completed.

it is ours and i can let the vendor back to collect his desks.
he's going to be in for quite a shock.
we've accomplished a LOT in 5 days graft.

(THANKS AGAIN to the perou inc. volunteer workforce!)

a new chapter begins.

in phase 1, the bow bunker will have two studios:

studio 1: a slick, bespoke, blackout studio with a large top and bottom cove
and
studio 2: a smaller stripped down studio for young photographers and photographers doing projects, deliberately under-priced to help people out who just need a dry, warm indoor space and don't want to/can't pay too much for it.

we have LOTS of plans for events on top of the hiring of studios for photography and film
look forward to seeing you there soon!