Jon co-founder CRUSH! Festival with some lovely friends as a way to help the flagging area of London they've all called home for the past twenty years. A response to the perfect storm of negative factors we are all facing: COVID, pandemic aftermath, cost-of-living crisis, Brexit-related staff-shortages, cash-strapped local councils, runaway inflation and spiralling costs.

These factors have all led to challenging trading times and made present the danger of our cultural ecosystems decaying quickly.

So we’re doing what East London does best... a huge party with all the bells and whistles, spearheading a giant renaissance.

From September 2024 onwards, focused on Mothership, Village Underground, EartH, &Soul, StreetFeast and many, many more venues and spread across five wards of South Hackney, we are partnering hundreds of artists, musicians, chefs, wellness practitioners, sporting heroes, charities, schools communities and stakeholders, coming together to help ourselves and our beloved capital city. We are seeking use of elements of the public realm - parks, streets, buildings, walls as well as the venues we are partnering. Hackney Council, the GLA and some corporate sponsors are already supporting us.

The point of all this? It’s a love letter to London. A re-telling of the whole history of counter-counter art and music from the time of Shakespeare to now.

Jon co-founded Mothership Group with Andy Maddocks in 2008, with the aim of running culturally relevant events for the Facebook Generation. They started with Queen of Hoxton and a team of 15, turning over £1million in the first year and by 2021, had grown to a £10million group of companies with four sites, including The Book Club, Colours and Patterns in Brighton. They feature regularly in the press and have won a number of industry awards.