I was stunned and deeply saddened to hear about the recent death of Chris Groner.

I met Chris whilst organising parts of Hackney Anarchy Week in 1996. H.A.W. was a 10 day festival of workshops, actions, gigs, films and other events held in one of London’s most anarchic boroughs. It was 10 days long because you got two weekends that way (including the Friday evening), which is how life should be. But did lead to all sorts of comments about anarchists refusing to be constrained by the bourgeois capitalist calendar (or failing that, not knowing what day it was).

The small group of people organising the festival were the usual suspects – people who had been through the mill of alternative politics and culture and were under no illusions about what was required. 6 months of meetings for a 10 day event isn’t the top of many people’s list of Fun Things To Do. But it was, inevitably: a laugh, frustrating, stupid and very satisfying, sometimes in the space of the same meeting. This was largely because of the personalities and skills of the people sitting around the table every Sunday afternoon in what was briefly to become a squatted social centre on Kingsland Road.

Chris was one of those people who managed to pull off having a keen sense of the ridiculous as well as being incredibly energetic and organised. Like many people involved with that milieu she leaves behind her a legacy of events, relationships and memories that are by their very nature never documented properly by the mainstream media. It’s up to us to remember each other and to try to place people’s contributions to the collective process of transforming the world into some sort of context.

And the world is a worse place without Chris, both because of what she did and more importantly, because of who she was. Some of the context is provided by this website, created by Chris’ friends, family and comrades: http://www.chris-groner.com

The rest of the context lies in our memories of Chris, and in trying to stay true to the beliefs that lay behind the projects, conversations and the feelings that are bound up in those memories.