London Hackspace celebrates move to new location with open day complete with spaceship simulator, DNA cocktails and liquid nitrogen ice cream
The London Hackspace celebrated the opening of their new headquarters on Hackney Road by hosting a barbecue on Sunday with some unique attractions including their very own spaceship simulator in a caravan.
The non-profit, community-run workshop space has outgrown its Hoxton home and is now one of the largest hackerspaces in the world with over 600 members.
The new 6500-square-foot location near Bethnal Green station will allow the London Hackspace to run more workshops open to the public whilst providing enough space for members to work in, according to Hackspace founder Russ Garrett:
“We weren’t really running any new events at our old space because we were so full,” Garrett told Tech City News. “There was basically no space for our existing members to store stuff and to do stuff, whereas here we’ve got an entire floor dedicated to workshops, and to workshop space, woodworking and metalworking and storage, and that leaves another floor for classrooms,” he added.
Spaceship simulator
London Hackspace hosts a variety of free workshops including bio-hacking, mind-hacking and arduino workshops, and many of their projects were on show at the opening of their new home at the weekend.
A fiercely difficult and impressively immersive spaceship simulator video game built inside a caravan was showcased, where members of the public formed the crew of the LHS Bikeshed, almost all of whom were annihilated by aliens, emerging from the caravan in clouds of smoke and fits of laughter.
Bio-Hacking
The Bio-Hackers, who are in the process of building their new lab, were manning the bar, extracting the DNA from strawberries before mixing it into tasty cocktails.
The founders of London Hackspace were the brains behind Electromagnetic Field, the UK’s first hacker festival held last summer just outside Milton Keynes which was host to an eclectic set of talks on everything from lock picking to beer brewing, and were also behind Electromagnetic Wave, a scaled down version of the event held on 5 May aboard the East German fishing vessel MS Stubnitz moored just near Canary Wharf.
The London Hackspace attracts many early stage start-ups as a place to work on prototypes, and Universal Air, a UK based start-up who make quadcopters and had a successful Kickstarter campaign last year, have held workshops there.
“People who come here are maker and creative types,” said Matt Peperell, long time Hackspace London member. “They come here for the fun of it. They do it because that is what they do, it’s their reason for being,” he told Tech City News.