Crowdfunding London

Chris Lockie
By Chris Lockie Last edited 127 months ago
Crowdfunding London

London Type

Crowd-funding site Kickstarter has put wind into the sails of many an excellent project over the last couple of years. Here we take a look at a few projects with either a London focus, or being produced by Londoners for Londoners (and everyone else).

London Type

How could we not start with a brand new London map? Filmmaker Sri Jiva Southall has stepped away from the camera for a few months to develop a map of the city where every street is replaced by the name of that street - ‘a map made out of type’, as the man himself calls it in the wonderfully nervous video about the project on his Kickstarter page.

Though the original £800 goal has now been met, you can still pledge a few quid for a copy of the map, or a few more for a personalised version of this excellent map. Get in soon though, as the Kickstarter is due to end this week.

Suburban Steps to Rockland – The Story of The Ealing Club

Celebrating an unsung venue of the London music scene, Suburban Steps to Rockland is planned to be a feature-length story of the club once dubbed ‘The Cradle of British Rock' by Mojo magazine. When the electric guitar boom of the 1960s got too much for the gentle ears of punters at the Marquee Jazz Club, musicians searching for a new venue to play British rhythm and blues settled in west London. The film will tell the tale of how the likes of the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton and The Who helped make the Ealing Club one of the city’s most storied venues.

Project: Bacon

The Homer Simpson in all of us will be drooling at the prospect of Irish Londoner Niamh Shields’s bacon-based cookbook should it pick up the funding it requires. Niamh plans no fewer than 80 recipes – all her own – alongside countless mouth-watering photos of, well, bacon. A guaranteed Christmas present for any fan of the Full English.

Flowdec

Most sports fans will agree that one of the first things they want to do when their team gets turned over, or gets the better of a fierce rival, is rant and rave or crow about it to anyone who’ll listen. Many, however, will know that hollow feeling when they bash out a furious or incendiary comment on a website only for it to remain unread by pretty much the entire internet. Flowdec aims to make these comments a lot more worthwhile by ‘crowdsourcing’ comments on all major UK and US sports and bringing them to one iOS or Android app for your entertainment (or fury).

London-based developers Andrew, Adi and Carl are hoping to tie up the funding for the app in the next three weeks and they have a video to seal the deal on their Kickstarter page.

The Chronic Issue

With either brave or foolhardy Uruguay looking set to become the first country to legalise cannabis in the coming weeks, London-based project The Chronic Issue will hope to capitalise on increased interest in the thorny issue of cannabis prohibition in the UK.

This documentary will take a fresh look at the history of the drug’s use and criminalisation – this is a not-for-profit endeavour with the aimed-for Kickstarter funds being used solely for research and production. Funding does have a way to go and with only a week left of the Kickstarter, if cannabis has ever been a part of your life, for better or worse, this must be a project worth backing.

Last Updated 06 August 2013