Play like Pooh at Potters Pantry

Dave McCormick on eating cake, playing games and sharing community stories

A front view of Potters Pantry cafe in Potters Road, with white lettering on a dark blue frontage and awning — Potters Pantry in Potters Road, New Barnet

Recent Barnet Post articles have highlighted how playing games can help raise awareness about the climate and biodiversity crisis and encourage people to live more sustainably. And the great work that Potters Pantry is doing in our local community in Barnet Vale ward has recently been front page news.

So, we decided to see what happens when our two worlds (cake and play) collide by inviting school children, community gardeners, a magistrate, a sustainability investment advisor, local nature experts, our MP Dan Tomlinson and Barnet Vale councillors Sue Baker and Richard Barnes to come to Potters Pantry to eat cake, play games, raise money and share community stories.

And all of them turned up.

We started with the quote often attributed to A.A Milne via Winnie-the-Pooh “we didn’t realize we were making memories, we just knew we were having fun”, a reminder that it is 100 years since the first Winnie the Pooh book was published. And that the stories are all about the local community (Pooh, Piglet, Kanga, Roo, Eeyore and Christopher Robin) playing games in the hundred acre wood, making new friends and learning about stuff.

That set the scene for us to play, starting with exploring the timeline of development of Barnet Vale between 1850 and 1950 when the area changed from fields and woods to stations, roads, churches, schools, public parks, homes and shops (the building where Potters Pantry is located was built in 1914).

We then had some fun trying to figure out whether the UK is better off today than it was in 1900. While GDP has grown and we collectively know more stuff, we also have higher national debt, ageing infrastructure, depleted nature and social tensions. So, the answer depends on what you are measuring!

Next up was a multiple-choice quiz to learn about the climate and nature crisis followed by a memory game about simple sustainability actions individuals can take to make a difference and a self-assessment of how frequently people took each of the nine different actions. As one of the players said – “we can always do more”, and another reminded us that “change starts at home”.

While this was going on the schoolchildren were having a go at Lego Serious Play – building a Lego model of an ideal “sustainable school” that was all about providing spaces for nature, sport and play.

Along the way we heard about the ideas that Potters Pantry has for helping our local community, some social issues that our local allotments face, and how eating cake can help us introduce more plant based ingredients into our diet.

After an hour our play time was over but, hopefully, memories were made. As the last sentence in The House of Pooh Corner says, “wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing”. And maybe some of us who were at Potters Pantry will remember it as a place where had fun and will go on to find other enchanted places to play and make a difference.

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