
Coming in from St Peter’s Road in Peterborough, passing the stone gate that was once part of Peterborough Cathedral’s historical grounds, you’ll see the cottage which (at the time of writing) houses many of Peterborough’s cultural organisations.
Peterborough as a city at the first glance isn’t the most apparent first choice for arts and cultural works – it sits awkwardly and conveniently about one hour from three cultural hotspots, London, Leicester and Cambridge. It’s not a big city, all the infrastructure for cultural community work basically resides in a walking distance radius.
Much has been written about Chauffeurs Cottage’s contribution to Peterborough’s cultural scene, and this text is not even going to attempt to convince you what a great place it is for the arts and culture workers community in Peterborough and beyond.
What we are going to talk about is the unglamorous reality of the move, how one thing unceremoniously ends and leads to an unknown future, and how we grieve over the loss of a space.

When the Metal Peterborough team approached me about running a food event as part of the programme that is a farewell to Chauffeurs Cottage with my collective Hidden Keileon, the conversations went into organising a form of communal and social food events from our East Asian heritage that dissolved the line between act of cooking and food serving – hot pot and dumplings making were on the table.
And when John told this story of how dumplings was something that is prepared at home as a lure, an invitation to come home and its significant of wrapping up whatever are available in the fridge, it became clear that the idea of dumplings as a metaphor of packing up and leaving a space will be how we approach the topic at hand. The event “Dumplings for Dinner Tonight!” then became the opening event for the Chauffeurs Cottage farewell programme, “What’s Possible When Things Go Wrong”.
Dumplings, much like many other East Asian food, has no one specific recipe to go off on, like chow mein (炒麵, which just literally translates to fried noodles), or fried rice (seems like they fired the guy that named chow mein), it’s more of a vague description of a form of culinary method entails in the food itself. The traditional Chinese words for dumplings: 餃子、餃兒、餃餌 – Some linguists suggest 餃 came from the word 攪, meaning to mix, alluding to the blending of ingredients for the filling – so the word can just be translated simply as “mixed things”.
A historical record from early Qing Dynasty Hebei Province, 肅寧縣誌 (the Suníng Xiànzhi), states: 「元旦子時,盛饌同離,如食扁食,名角子,取其更歲交子之義。」(“On New Year’s Eve, at midnight, a sumptuous feast was held, and people would eat flat dumplings¹ called 角子, the horned shape food. This was done to signify the transition from the old to the new year.”) Dumplings, for all its historical roots, signified changes and renewals.

When I moved to Peterborough, I was moving away from London to move in with my parents, years since I left home to try to live on my own. After years of living as the stereotype of an artist living in a studio flat in Hackney, the post-pandemic rent hike was proven too much for my mental and physical health trying to make enough to pay rent (on an artist’s salary, mind you), I was by all intents and purposes, felt like I’ve defeated by London, defeated by something completely out of my control.
The move itself is nothing to write home about. Looking back at it, the most difficult part of leaving a home behind is to re-examine every piece of items I own, the memories they carry with them. Memories, whether good or bad, are an inextricable part of who we are. Changes come, and the best I can do, or the only thing I can do, really, is to pack up the pieces, physically and emotionally, into little dumplings in the form of boxes and storage bags.
In Metal Peterborough’s case, the walls of every room in Chauffeurs Cottage are covered in photos and glimpses of previous works. I’ve always loved that one picture with the long tables in the Cathedral Square, it looks like a fantastic event, and chatting with people that are part of it just adding so many stories and spirit to the space.
In our discussion after the dumpling making and eating at our event, a topic came up regarding the idea of traditions and patterns of lives. The way we see stories passing on each other, from the tales your grandparents told you about a long-lost time and place, to your local chicken shop owner recognises you and knows the orders you’re going to make, we pass on stories of lived experience and interactions that then weave into strands of social habits, that turn into traditions, and in some cases, rituals. We do that to form our lives and culture.
These traditions and rituals are then ideologically inseparable from the architectures that create them. To lose a space like Chauffeurs Cottage, is losing a temple – a place of awe and communal gatherings – the rift this move creates is not dissimilar to the disconnection created by colonialism and generation trauma. Our nervous system can hardly tell the differences.
Dumplings as a food are fluid, formless, basically made up of whatever is available to whoever’s making them. I like to think of the act of wrapping, in all the layered sense – the encasing of parts / Ingredients, an ending / completion, the packing up of old memories – there is a fruitful gift at the end of it.


¹ I would like to take a little etymological detour here to mention the word eat comes from its Germanic root of eoten / eten, which means both the action of eating and the food itself, and in this sentence in Chinese 「如食扁食」can be more elegantly translate to “to eten flat eten” if I get to use it that way (cursing the Romans for Latin and colonisation). Clearly this detour may be too far away for the main text, so this is where you will find this tangent. Thank you for reading!