Backspace is a Web server, and was a real space: an independent media lab. Can you tell us about how Backspace came about?

I guess in its first incarnation as an idea it was something that we boiled down as a group in discussion. And Heath Bunting, who involved at that time, and was stimulating a whole range of networking interactions, which included fax networks and the tail end of the mail art stuff.
And just gadding about. I think that's what we're all doing. We all spent a lot of time on it at that point, visiting each other, or locations in town where some new media was going on.

And discussions came up again and again that it would be nice to have a place where that generally happened with more continuity and a greater sense of identity. The term at the time was cybercafe, and there weren't any cybercafes, so that really was quite a prophecy if you consider how the propagation of that idea globally... but I'm not sure that that was entirely out of our own efforts.

Certainly Heath's quite quick at understanding and adopting activities that are going on. If you are travelling and visiting, and you are migrating ideas around as much as collecting up the pollen and reseeding.

So that's a genuine motivation and an understanding of what is required to get culture flowing in a new sphere. And it was a new sphere: the idea of playing with technology. So much of the stuff, even at that stage, was straight out of the labs in terms of the modems and wires in computers.

What year was this set up?

I guess I was talking to him while I was still working in Putney doing

Brag, which was a booking agency working with architects. It must have been 92, 93. So our discussion came out of nowhere as far as the Net's concerned.
There really wasn't any physical evidence of it except for some email structure that I'd experienced being involved in the music biz a bit.

So there was no commercial use of the Internet at that point?

No. I did an MA at that time in Middlesex and they didn't even issue email accounts for students, so it was prior to all of that.
Really what stimulated the opening of a real physical space was a response to a commercial situation which I found myself in, in terms of Obsolete, which was a Web design boutique which was started in 95.

And I say 'we'. There were certainly three of us to start with, which grew very quickly into eight or nine people tending to quite early requests for Web design and demonstrating what's possible in all sorts of forms with the Internet, with networks, over wire, with this whole prospect of an international scene.
And what we found within that space, although we had a really fabulous social setting in our studios in Clink Street, in the Winchester Wharf building, we had populated pretty much all throughout the day and the night very often, not just because we had loads of work on - we very much didn't most of the time. We certainly spent most of the time mucking about, and when the interest waned in terms of computing and the weaving of HTML then people played records and hung out and generally engaged in quite deep and meaningful social exchange, which was something that, once we got a bit more commercial, we found more and more difficult to accommodate.

It just so happened that another space came up in the building which I looked on very favourably as an opportunity to get on and actually open up something that we talked about previously in discussions in the earlier part of the decade about a social setting for interaction and experimentation with tech. So that's the point it starts, really.