Promise is a Fight for Peace Young Creative, an Architecture Technology student, a muay thai athlete, and a member of the North Woolwich community. We asked him for some of his time to pick his brain on what the world looks like through the eyes of an architect, what Fight for Peace means to him, and what role it plays in our community. 

“I am very passionate about fighting and understanding what I want to do with my life. I try to be more consistent and create more mental discipline and habits, that’s what me being at Fight for Peace is really about. 

Consistency comes with the mental difficulties and the challenges of being under pressure because sometimes you can feel pressure but it’s a mental thing and you are not able to release it physically. It’s about learning that I can go to a place where I can release the stress that I feel on a mental basis but release it in a physical way, and train myself in a good manner and good form. That’s what it has been like for me at Fight for Peace.

Me being in society, I just want to be the best version of myself and that’s how I want to live my life. I want to be able to see the best version of myself, see who that guy is and what he looks like and what he does. 

KNOW WHAT YOU LOVE AND PUT IT FIRST
I have known people in the area who have come here and I know how they have grown. Fight for Peace is very impactful to the area I do believe, so it’s part of the community and that’s one of the things it needs to be and that’s something that I really do focus on when I am building a house, how does that affect the area and the community? You’ve got to know what you love and put that first. 

Fight for Peace is not fully embedded in the community but it could be, I see the potential. There are a lot of things that Fight for Peace has the capacity to do in terms of training the youth and understanding who they are and who they are meant to be. Fight for Peace is certainly the type of place and people to do that.  

There’s a lot of adversity in North Woolwich. You have to be able to pull people out, because they don’t come out, they are always in their homes. And I feel that Fight for Peace needs to find a way to help them come out. That adversity can be mental challenges, physical struggles, it could be financial, mental, spiritual even. 

Sometimes people just need to be able to throw a jab and relax. Lots of people are scared to take that step and it’s about trying to get those people out of their houses and take the first step and realise this is your stage. Because lots of people don’t know what their next stage is, they don’t have the vision they need to build the thing that they want to. 

INSPIRATION AND LOVE-HATE 
Working on a recent documentary at Fight for Peace exposed me to a fighter’s road to the muay thai ring and that now encouraged me to do better in things I am going to do. It inspires you to want to do better and feed into the things that you have got going on. And that’s the type of motivation that I get from Fight for Peace.

Uni is a love-hate relationship for me. I love it because it is personal to me, I am at university for personal reasons, I want to be an architect or an architectural technologist.

I really want to build houses and places that make people and society feel comfortable. I have always cared about people, that’s my thing. I can design and provide a space for you where you don’t feel left out essentially and I think that’s so important because I grew up watching people being very uncomfortable in environments and me having to be that bridge.

PURPOSE AND SOCIAL IMPACT
I love learning and that’s why I am at architecture school because it puts me in a place of ‘ok cool, what don’t I know?’ And it’s ok not to know. It’s a process. I have never been about profit, I have always been about purpose, because it’s not about me in the end, you have got to be selfless in life.

I think the architecture has a social impact on the area of North Woolwich. It’s an area that has a lot of potential, I think it could easily become like a Miami of London. But right now it is so closed off and not many people pay attention to it and you have access to places like Fight for Peace that have not really been put on show, they have just been clouded and towered over so people don’t have complete access.

LET YOURSELF BE KNOWN
I think that Fight for Peace is letting itself be known. That’s a very handy thing to do, like even having a really big blue building is cheeky but you are letting yourself be known, I can see this building from my university. 

It’s letting people know, I have a presence in this place, it’s abstract. If you draw a skyline, from a colour point of view it would be masonry brown, brown, brown, then a blue dot – Fight for Peace – then brown again. If I had to draw Fight for Peace in a simple colour it would just be a cube in a blue highlighter, and then you’d know, cool that’s Fight for Peace, and it stands up socially because when people say, ‘do you go to Fight for Peace?’, you say, ‘yes just look out for a blue building’. It does the thing that North Woolwich needs to do which is speak up.”