East London is full of fantastic stories.
Our area has incredibly rich social, political, and cultural histories, and will allow us to explore many themes which are supremely relevant today, such as housing, migration, poverty, and dissent.
Besides, it’s overflowing with brilliant stories of pride, pleasure, creativity, humour, resilience, resourcefulness and of course, resistance – from the Bow Matchwomen’s Strike to the Battle of Cable Street, the Ford Dagenham machinists’ walkout to the Bengali families squatting empty buildings in Spitalfields.
We're making a missing museum.
We originally started this project as a protest against the Ripper Museum on Cable Street in Shadwell, as the people behind it had originally promised it would be a museum of east London women's history. Instead the local people got a tourist attraction about Jack the Ripper. Like a lot of people we were angry, so we decided to make the missing museum and talk about women’s lives, not just their deaths.
Looking for histories beyond the Tower.
In case you were wondering, we use a deliberately loose and ahistorical definition of 'east London', rather like John Strype in 1720 when he described the area as “that part beyond the Tower”. We hope to draw on the histories of the traditional East End in Tower Hamlets and Newham, but also from Hackney, Waltham Forest, Barking & Dagenham, and Redbridge.
Read about some of our recent projects and find out how you can support us.