Our main events programme includes talks, films and workshops open to all. Participant numbers are kept intentionally small and significant time is allocated for discussion, either guided or informal. Food is an important component of our evening events, which usually include a break for a one-pot vegan supper that we eat together.

Bioregions & the Commons: Becoming Citizens of Place in a Changing World with Isabel Carlisle

Tuesday February 18th, 6.30 for 7pm

Bioregions, and bioregioning, are seeing a worldwide renaissance that offers a viable response to the polycrisis. How could this very old model of human organising become a template for the future?

Bioregion literally means ‘life region’ and from the earliest times our species has aligned itself with nature’s life-support systems of food, water, energy, shelter, plant medicines and materials for making, such as wood and stone. The agricultural revolution of the Neolithic, and more recently the industrial revolution, set up a metabolic rift between those life systems and human societies. We’re experiencing the consequences of that today.

Isabel Carlisle, co-founder of the Bioregional Learning Centre (BLC) in South Devon, will explore how bioregional organising could help build regional resilience and reinvent the idea of being a citizen of place. In the same way that there would be no commons without commoning, ‘bioregioning’ is a relational practice that animates a region and addresses the impacts of geo-systemic change on natural and human-made systems. More than that, it’s about meeting the deep human need of belonging to place.

The rise in interest in the global and local commons and the fraying of our social, economic and governance structures are all putting air beneath the wings of the bioregional movement. Isabel will describe the establishment of bioregioning in places as far apart as Costa Rica, the Arctic and Cascadia in Western North America. She will detail the work of the BLC to create the infrastructure needed to establish bioregioning in South Devon (including the creation of a devolved citizen council, bioregional financing and other projects). She will argue that bioregions and bioregioning could help us gain the agency we need to start shaping our future.

Learning From Conservative Media: How To Counter Anti-Climate Messages With Geoff Dembicki

Thursday February 20th, 6.30 for 7pm

Why are anti-climate messages resonating at a time when extreme weather disasters are escalating and solutions to the crisis have never been stronger? What can people who care deeply about a liveable planet do to counter their influence?

Canadian investigative journalist Geoff Dembicki will draw on his years of reporting on conservative media to reveal how fossil fuel companies and their political allies are successfully spreading skepticism about climate solutions by linking those solutions to issues including abortion, free speech, diversity initiatives and high housing costs.

He will also share insights from growing up in working-class resource towns to explain how communities on the front-lines of oil and gas extraction are more open to transformative climate action than it might initially appear. This talk, which will be followed by plenty of time for discussion, will cover questions of social status and narrative that go to the heart of how we understand and communicate the climate crisis.

Kairos Club Drinks

Friday February 21st, 6.30pm-11pm

Our usual club drinks with free entry and a pay bar with alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks and food.

Club Drinks now takes place every Friday.

Revisiting Radical Ideas Past: An Evening of Shared Readings

Thursday February 27th, 6.30 for 7pm

Join us for an evening of shared readings from the works of visionary past thinkers. Which radical ideas from the past should we revisit to help us understand and respond to this current moment?

Figures we have in mind include William Blake, Ivan Illich, Donella Meadows, Alfred North Whitehead, bell hooks, Raymond Williams, John Berger, Agnes Heller, Fritjof Capra and Dorothy Smith, among others. We’d also love to learn about other, perhaps lesser known past thinkers whose work we should return to.

All are invited to propose a short reading via events@kairos.london, or just come along and listen. If you’re unable to attend but have suggestions for other past thinkers we’d love to hear from you. Do let us know if there are any written works in particular you think we should include in our library collection.

Britain’s Common Land: Past, Present and Future with Helen Baczkowska

Wednesday March 5th, 6.30 for 7pm

Britain’s common lands have long been contested. Historic enclosures of commons changed the very fabric of Britain’s society and ecology and cast a still lingering shadow over rural England.

The commons that still remain today are often misunderstood, with their legal protections and ownership hard to grasp. Helen will de-mystify these complex issues and look at how common land remains at the very heart of debates over grazing in the uplands, and of the management of flood waters, re-wilding and peatlands.

In this talk followed by discussion, writer, ecologist and environmental activist Helen Baczkowska will explore what common land is in the twenty first century and how crucial it is for nature conservation and public access, as well as how conversations about its governance, both past and present, can help teach us about the commons of the future.

We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For with Adam Greenfield

Thursday March 13th, 6.30 for 7pm

How can we hold our own against the Long Emergency?

We have together entered an epoch in which not merely the raw fact of climate-system collapse, but the second- and third-order consequences of that unfolding, threaten to undo the infrastructural, economic, political, social and even psychological systems that undergird everyday experience: a Long Emergency with radically uncertain prospects for the sustainment of any life we recognise, and no clear end in sight.

In this talk, based on his 2024 book Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World On Fire, Adam Greenfield explores ways in which we might organise ourselves to not merely survive this Long Emergency, but to do so in ways that uphold our fundamental commitments to dignity and justice.

We’ll learn lessons from a number of communities that have faced down existentially hard times before, from the “survival programs” of the Black Panthers in the 1970s to the self-organised Occupy Sandy mutual-aid initiative, the solidarity networks of Crisis-era Greece and the large-scale, non-state society of Rojava.

We’ll see how participants in all of these efforts experienced an expanded sense of possibility, purpose, and their own power; explore the reciprocal relationship between that power and the provision of mutual care; and finally weave these threads together in the book’s culminating proposition: that we establish a network of the neighbourhood-based, self-organised and self-sustaining relief and recovery hubs called Lifehouses.

Reviving the Blue Commons: A Plan to Repair our Ocean

Tuesday March 18th, 6.30 for 7pm

As part of our year-long series on the Commons, we’re coming together to co-create a vision for the Ocean Commons and explore how we might bring it about.

The ocean is under attack. For decades it has been exploited for the benefit of the few – coastal communities are struggling to survive, fish populations are plummeting and the ocean is awash with pollutants. The demands we are placing on the ocean are increasing year on year. This “Blue Acceleration” is leading us towards disaster. But another ocean is possible.

In this participatory event, featuring a series of short presentations from oceans experts followed by small group discussion, we’ll explore how to reinstate the ocean as a Commons. Economist Guy Standing will explore the necessary laws and governing mechanisms needed to revive the Blue Commons. Political theorist Chris Armstrong will advocate for Blue Justice: The ocean is a more-than-human space, so whose Commons is it? Social movement scholar Antje Scharenberg will explore Blue Activism, asking what kind of ocean democracy we can hope for. And Tobias Troll from NGO Seas at Risk will explain the concept of the Blue Doughnut: How can we care for the ocean and look after ourselves?

Collectively, we’ll then begin drafting a set of demands to be included in the Charter of the Commons being developed at Kairos over the course of the year, and which could initially be presented at the UN Oceans Conference 2025 taking place in June.

Open Projects Night

Tuesday April 1st, 6.30 for 7pm

Join us for our regular open mike night, where we’ll learn about each others projects, build connections and offer each other support.

This is for: Anyone with a radical idea they’d like to share and workshop. Anyone setting up or running a small Kairos-aligned project who needs support. Anyone with skills and experience they’d like to share. Anyone who would like to help grow our interconnectedness.

The evening will include a series of short interactive presentations, a chance to workshop a few of the projects presented, and a one-pot vegan supper that we’ll eat together.

How We Live and How We Might Live with Ken Worpole

Thursday April 3rd, 6.30 for 7pm

How can we move from communities of interest to communities of care?

In his 1964 essay, “Urban Place and the Non-Place Public Realm”,  American urban designer Melvin Webber coined a phrase which anticipated the changing nature of social life in the modern world: community without propinquity. This suggested that the communities of the future would be based more on shared interests and identities than physical proximity and face-to-face encounters. Webber predicted this long before the Internet made the creation of online ‘communities’ – whose reach now extends across the globe – even more commanding.

Today social media generates millions of such self-described ‘communities’, none of whose members have ever met in person. In such conditions, social change becomes ever more difficult to achieve, for as John Stuart Mill argued in “Principles of Political Economy” (1848), society needs ‘experiments in living’ – new forms of working and living together – to guard against ‘the weight of Custom bearing down upon human capacity for improvement.’

In his recent books, New Jerusalem: The Good City and the Good Society (2017), No Matter How Many Skies Have Fallen: back to the land in wartime Britain (2021), and Brightening from the East: Essays on landscape & memory (2025), writer and social historian Ken Worpole explores the post-war history of such experiments in living and working together, now commonly called elective or ‘intentional’ communities.

In this talk, Ken will highlight four remarkable case studies he knows well – one environmental, one pacifist, one religious in origin but open to all, and one a newly opened experiment in social care – and discusses what we might learn from them as we face the environmental and social upheavals of tomorrow.

Deep Conversations: What Does it Mean To Step Up?

Tuesday April 8th, 6.30 for 7pm

What are our responsibilities in a time of ecological collapse? How can we find the power to act? What should we do and who can we do it with?

Join us for a series of guided, inter-generational, small group conversations in which we’ll talk about what it means to step up at this time. Questions we’ll ask will include: Where does the balance of responsibility lie between older and younger generations? How can we challenge the prevailing system while still living inside it? How can we exert pressure and instigate change from within our work and other social contexts? What is the balance between external and internal transformation? How might we involve and activate our family members and friendship groups?

We’ll also discuss the role of civil disobedience and the other ways we might harness our collective power. What the minimum is that we should all be doing to curb our personal consumption and withdraw our consent.  How to find a role that draws on our strengths and talents, without spreading ourselves too thin or burning out. How to contribute to a shifting collective consciousness. And how we might lead by example.

This is an invitation to combine theories of change with personal stories, to find empowerment in community, explore our own limits, and build solidarity and understanding.

Rooted Innovation: The Future of Technology with Joycelyn Longdon

Tuesday April 15th, 6.30 for 7pm

What does the future of technology look like amidst ecological and cultural breakdown? How we might come to see technology as a generational practice of craft, learning from those who have come before us, and those whose technologies are grounded in reciprocal relationships with the environment, in order to build the worlds of the future?

Joycelyn Longdon, environmental justice technologist, author, educator and PhD Candidate at the University of Cambridge, will explore the histories and possibilities of technology beyond a Western industrialist view, beyond silver bullets and panacean solutions, towards an appreciation of the many forms of technology, old and new, material and cultural and the technologies nature itself designs.

Joycelyn’s research focuses on the design of justice-led conservation technologies for monitoring of biodiversity with local forest communities in Ghana. Her debut book, “Natural Connection: What Indigenous Wisdom and Marginalised People Teach us about Environmental Actionwas published in April 2025.

Save the Date

Tuesday March 25th
Tim Jackson on economies of care

Thursday March 27th
Jenny Goodman
on ecological medicine: healing the people, healing the planet.

Full listings for these events coming soon

Regular Fixtures

Every Friday, 6.30-11pm
Kairos Club Drinks

Our club drinks is now weekly. Free entry with a pay bar serving drinks, both alcoholic and non-alcoholic, and vegan food. There may be some entertainment.

Sundays, 12-5pm (dependent on volunteers, check main listings for confirmation)
Sunday Reading Room

A chance to come and browse our books or bring your own (but please no laptops, kindles, smartphones or other electronic devices.) For Sunday Reading Room to become a weekly fixture it will rely on volunteers to supervise the space. If you’d like to get involved join the WhatsApp group here or email events@kairos.london.

Fridays, 10am-5pm
Community Day

We’re now opening our doors on Fridays for aligned groups needing a place to meet. This is non-exclusive, daytime use of our space for brainstorms and strategy meetings, book group discussions and other creative get-togethers. Only by arrangement. Email events@kairos.london.

The Second Wednesday of Every Month
Book Club
Look out for listings on this page, or email events@kairos.london if you’d like to join the Book Club WhatsApp group.

The First Tuesday of Every Other Month
Open Projects Night
Our regular open mike night, where we’ll learn about each others projects, build connections and offer each other support. Look out for listings on this page or email events@kairos.london with details of the project you’d like to share.

Please note that all attendees at our events are expected to follow club rules:
Kairos is a space for radical ideas about social and cultural change. All discussions begins with the understanding that humanity is facing an existential crisis. There is no debate about the reality of this situation.
Please no grandstanding, rank-pulling, up-staging, down-putting or mansplaining.
Mobile phones, laptops and other devices may not be used inside the club There will be no photos and/or recordings without prior agreement.
Kairos is a place for imaginative thinking. Anyone displaying a consistent lack of imagination will be asked to leave.
Please be sociable, particularly towards anyone on their own or new to Kairos.
This is a vegan space.
Members must commit to developing nurturing, disseminating and enacting ideas seeded at Kairos and to supporting fellow members outside the club’s activities.

Kairos is a not-for-profit grant-funded project and anything we take in ticket sales is solely to cover our costs. We aim to be as inclusive as possible so if you’re keen to attend an event but struggling to afford a ticket, please get in touch and we’ll see what we can do. If you’d like to help subsidise tickets for the less well-off by donating to the project, you can find out more here. Thanks so much for your support.

You can find our returns policy here.

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Kairos, 84 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4TG