The woodburning pizza oven was an integral part of our community at Haphazard social centre in Hackney and was not designed to make profit but to benefit our community.

It has been described as a diving bell, a bathyscape, a space ship and a dalek.  At parties it has been more photographed than the DJs but the hand built, one of a kind pizza oven which once resided at Haphazard in London Fields, is now also being accused of being some kind of evil Capitalist machine.  Scathing comments have been posted on Indymedia by some of the Urban Haphazard Takeover crew in a fight that has got a bit too personal to be online and is more about ego and power than the real facts!!

It is important to me to set this story straight as I was part of the community who lived and put on events at Haphazard over the last few months and it is a real shame to see people's hard work and passion to do something well reduced to petty fights on the internet.

The oven which was designed by Francis and made by a very nice man called Gareth in Wales (who got paid very fairly for his time and materials), was then finished off by a group of volunteers and mates when it arrived back in London.  The joins were angle ground down in the sizzling heat and it was sprayed and pulled into Haphazard on it's in-built trailer.

The oven runs off recycled off-cuts of wood, which would otherwise be thrown away from a furniture manufacturing company in Hertfordshire.  The ingredients are bought fresh from ethical suppliers with a small amount of the vegetables being skipped from Spitalfields wholesale market.  The dough is hand-kneaded and this is very time-consuming and hard work.  The pizzas are master-crafted and extremely tasty, certainly not your average stringy iceland frozen pizza and the price reflects this but is not excessive and not designed to make excessive profit.  The price is however designed to cover costs.

The pizza oven was an integral part of our community at Haphazard: from us all learning how to make pizza dough and pizzas at varying degrees of sucess, to feeding the entire crew of every party that was put on, as well as providing regular Sunday roasts, pizzas for our meetings and the funds to cover the costs of materials for the Subconscious art exhibition.

Francis who designed the oven and paid for it to be built, has never made a penny from the profits of selling the pizzas at parties.  The money made if any (there is usually not much) goes to the people who've been working hard making the pizzas all night, chopping vegetables, kneading dough, keeping the fire stoked and serving out the pizzas but making money is not our main aim and never has been! Our main aim is our crew getting fed in a creative and fun way.

The little money that is made is going back into our community where most of us don't sign on and run social projects as volunteers.  Capitalism's main aim is monetary profit, our main aim is a social one, to do with people not money!  I believe in benefits and charity but the method the pizza oven works on is a sustainable model and a social enterprise.  We are working together as a community to keep the community going and the pizza oven is a small but important and inspirational part of this which should be celebrated and encouraged, not insulted.