Hornby Community Centre 25th Anniversary

Tuesday 22 February 2005

• Worth stopping to think about how radically different our whole idea of community was 25 years ago. It was an understanding that even then we did not think needed debate.
• We were still getting our news and entertainment from the same main sources, a couple of papers, three main TV channels and that was pretty much that.
• Cell phones were just starting to show up as yuppie toys, big as bricks and generally regarded by most of us as about as useful.
• There was no Internet. It just did not exist. The whole idea that we would end up with people living here and working for companies in another time zone on the other side of the world was just science fiction.
• What it did all mean was that while we were technology and information poor, we were all still as they say in public relations "reading off the same page".
• It was a lot easier to hold onto a sense of community then than it is now.
• What is worth keeping in mind is that despite all this change, it is still that sense of community that is closest to our hearts.
• In a world where it sometimes seems everyone is reading from a different page, community building centres like this are more important, not less.