Stoep Collective London

26/08/2026

26/08/2026

26/08/2026

Briefly leaving our current hibernation to extend our condolences to our besties at BLONDE MILK ™ - WELCOME TO THE LAND OF BLONDE | LOCAL JEWELRY 🪩🫶🏻🎸

There’s nothing not to love about Dolly. But what we loved most of all?

Dolly Parton’s love of reading 📚

Since 1995, her Imagination Library has gifted over 332 MILLION books to children from birth to age five, across the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia and Republic of Ireland.

An icon, an angel. And now, a saint 💓

13/08/2026

Our latest newsletter is on its way to your inbox.

This issue starts with a colander on a street corner in Walthamstow 🌓

From there, it traces a line through astronomy, ancestry, the Royal Observatory in Cape Town, and the ripple effects of empire and diaspora.

Also, it really is just an excuse to stop, rest and notice the small stuff.

Words: Megan Ross 🐝

Sign up to read Studio Missive No. 15: A Colander, An Eclipse.

🔗🌙 https://www.stoepcollective.com/missives

12/08/2026

We shouldn’t be this sweaty in August 👀🫩

London’s parks are brown. Rivers are draining.

And our cultural fixation on endless summer — on youth, on being eternally subscribed, on forever — is distracting us from this fact: summer was always meant to be a season.

Staring down the barrel of true climate collapse, we need to be elevating those doing the good work:
· Work that honours the natural world
· Work and relationships without extraction
· Work that honours land and water

If this is the kind of work you’re doing, we’d love to hear from you.

🔗🔮 For more fragments, musings & missives from our studio, follow
Stoep Collective London, and visit our studio at www.stoepcollective.com

11/08/2026

This isn't standard fare, but neither is femicide.

Or a Women's Day where an entire country of women live in constant fear.

Or the insidious stain of gender-based violence bloodying childbirth, an experience that should be, at its most basic, safe and clean, not dangerous, or terrifying, or life-threatening.

Colleagues, friends, if your experience of childbirth was not ruined by negligent, rogue medical practitioners, then my essay might not resonate with you.

It’s probably difficult to fathom labour — a natural process that can actually feel enormously empowering, as the start of mine truly was — as a threat to one’s life and health ever after.

If your gynae or midwife was kind and honoured your body, offered care that was appropriate and consensual, listened to your pain and kept you safe, then it might be tough imagining that rogue medical practitioners can also enact monstrous violence on labouring women.

Like a scar that knits over a wound, my body clings to many memories from the night of 23 September 2015, and the morning that followed during which my precious, beautiful son was born, Heritage Day in South Africa, the very reason why we are alive (no traffic — we could speed to the hospital as I’d begged for).

And as a scar reminds us, I am at once healed, and at once injured, and none of this makes me bad, or shameful, or “too much”, as I’ve consistently been told since I began to speak and write about C-PTSD and post-partum mental illness related to medical negligence and obstetric violence.

I've given talks to medical students at the University of Cape Town, where a fourth-year male student rushed to me after, sobbing uncontrollably, to thank me for helping him see that "women in labour aren't just bodies".

That said women should be asked before an internal.
That any of it should be consensual.

I've packed venues and book launches because I am open to speaking about something so taboo, that women across the world in fact, the United Kingdom and South Africa included, are encouraged to shut up about.

I have never been good at keeping my mouth shut, in professional or personal settings, and I suppose that's why, post-Women's Day, the 70th anniversary of it too, I refuse to let time or distance (or stigma) frighten me from sharing a truth that might help another mother who thought she was alone.

That it was her fault.

Quick one, honey: it's not. It never was. 🩵

🔗 Obstetric violence IS gender-based violence: https://substack.com/home/post/p-210499678

10/08/2026

A world without season — permanently sunny, always happy, forever young — is quite literally a dead world.

After all, decay and rot are as much a part of living as life is!

In our studio, we’ve been thinking about climate, culture, and the creative (and psychic!) cost of chasing eternity 🦥

For the makers, the artists, the directors, the organisations; the ones who are tired of endless subscription, have a read!

🐚: Words by Megan Natasha Ross

🔗🔮 And once you’ve done that, visit our studio at www.stoepcollective.com

10/08/2026