Thought the most glamorous thing about the Women’s Institute was the Helen Mirren vehicle about a racy calendar? You thought wrong. Jazz Mellor, daughter of The Clash’s Joe Strummer, is reclaiming granny activities for the cool kids.


The first official meeting of the Shoreditch Sisters, East London’s re-imagined Women’s Institute spearheaded by Joe Strummer’s daughter Jazz Mellor, was held in a cold warehouse space on Curtain Road, a side-street of the cool Hackney area of East London where  fashion elite and art students collide. The speaker, Andrea Oliver, renowned TV and radio presenter and one half of the BBC’s lively cookery programme Neneh and Andi – Dishing It Up, started off by telling the group of assembled girls the history of cooking and why she finds it a spiritual experience. She spoke of the connection between cooking and music, emphasising the immediacy and passion that they can both evoke. The crowd – with a rough average age of 25, the youngest Women’s Institute to date – learnt of some of her inspirations: Edna Lewis, the first woman chef to be widely accepted, mainly in the high class New York kitchens of the 50s and 60s, Nigel Slater, whose books are filled with not just recipes but also intimate stories of the his life. “Food cooked with no love is just not worth eating,” Ms Oliver had said, imparting her favourite philosophy on the next generation of wives, or, more likely, independent women.

“That was exactly the environment we are aiming to create,” says president and founder Mellor, of the East London posse who meet up once a month at a designated hotspots to learn anything from handicrafts, sewing or self defense. “Though some of us are embarrassed to admit to not knowing certain things, we are here to learn.”

The group started as an informal monthly get-together for which they took it in turns to pick themes – poetry, music, icons… When they found they fitted perfectly into the Institute’s mould, they decided to turn themselves into a new branch.

The first meeting of this year was a ‘Make Do and Mend’ session, filmed by ABC America. Sharing a little tipple of wine and an abundance of Cherry Bakewells, the Shoreditch Sisters WI embarked on a little ‘credit crunch’ ‘Make Do and Mend’ session -  originally being a wartime campaign from the Ministry of Information. The main emphasis was on conservation and recycling, and Britons were encouraged to become more self-sufficient by making greater use of the materials they already had, often re-purposing objects in order to prolong their war effort. This version saw spools of brightly coloured thread and vintage pin cushions strewn across wooden tables of sock monkeys, patchwork iPod covers and one suspiciously accurate doll in the shape of Madonna’s The Girly Tour , conical bra and all. It is fair to assume that this is far cooler endeavour than the Women’s Institutes of the past.

“[Our generation] mostly had fairly chaotic childhoods,” says Mellor, “so I suppose this is a way of rebelling.”








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