Stratford and West Ham: My Roots, Our Heritage

Eastside Community Heritage worked in partnership with a group of young people from Stratford and West Ham Youth Forum – FSW (Newham Youth Parliment).

The group was involved in documenting and researching the experiences that affected people from the African/Caribbean communities. As part of their research, the group visited the Back to Black exhibiton at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, Newham’s Caribbean Identities Exhibition at The Old Dispensary, where they attended a workshop with a storyteller and also a workshop at the Museum of London. They made a trip to the Closing the door? exhibition at the Jewish Museum – where they enacted some of their own performance poetry.

Over nine months the group undertook oral history training to enable them to interview their elders. The group visited museums and archives to research the history of African/Caribbean communities over the past 50 years. They used their research and the interviews as the basis of the script, which they then rehearsed, performed and filmed in various locations. The final outcome of the project was a video film and an exhibition which was screened in April 2006 at the Museum of London.