By Verity-Jane Keefe, in conversation with Kate Batchelor, and designed with Paul Bailey

From Social to Sociable offers a six-year window into a place, its residents, and a building. It centres around care and relationships. What is it to breathe new life into a building that has existing histories? What are the logistics of bringing a speculative funding bid to life? What is it to be an artist working on a design team? What is the role and potential of the artist working within regeneration? How can we work with communities to make things public? At its heart this is a book that documents and demystifies process – not as a traditional case study, but an honest open conversation between the client and commissioner, Kate Batchelor, and lead artist on the design team, Verity-Jane Keefe. It aims to share some of the mechanics and politics of what it takes to get things done, the importance of respecting both building and community, and how this is merely the next chapter in Thamesmead's Moorings Sociable Club’s lifecycle. This is not a guidebook, nor is it a manual for suggested best practice. It is an archaeology and atlas of a building and a project, which is both the backdrop and protagonist, and collaborative processes between a client trying to do things differently and an artist finding herself working within architecture to positively disrupt how “regeneration” might be done (slowly).