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East End Women c.1930

Treating the injured - The Battle of Cable Street, 1936

Christmas shopping in Petticoat Lane Market, 1961

Remembering Your East End

"Immigration as a whole has made the East End something which is distinct from any other part of London, in which you've got a mixture of all nationalities. The major question before us now, is how do we all make a contribution in order to ensure that there is peace and civility amongst us all?"

Max Levitas

In January 2006 we began working with care settings in Tower Hamlets and Newham. Newly trained East End project workers ran reminiscence sessions for older people on the themes of Health & Welfare, Women, World War II & the Blitz, Migration, Childhood & Streets and Work and which have been used as the themes for the resulting exhibition.

At the same time, posters encouraging the wider East End public to support the project with their own family memories, were put up in hospitals, surgeries, pubs and community centres. As well as group reminiscence sessions in care settings there have been 51 recorded individual interviews. Many of these have formed the heart of this touring exhibition.

This project has aimed to give many people who have not considered their life experience important the opportunity to have their say and to pass on their evocative and powerful memories of East End life to future generations. As such the exhibition has not attempted to imitate textbook histories of the East End, but to try and create a sense of the sights, sounds, and experience of the place, through hearing from the people who lived there.

We are delighted that as we enter the final stage of the project, participants are now working with Age Exchange on a programme of reminiscence workshops for schools.

The reminiscence interviews and project archive will be given to local libraries and museums for the education of future generations of Londoners. We would like to thank everyone who has taken part.

Remembering Your East End will conclude with the production of a learning website for schools and the general public, available at http://www.age-exchange.org.uk/eastend/. The website will offer the ability to view the touring exhibition online and will provide additional resources and exercises for schools, together with links to related resources.

The exhibition has toured venues in the East End for the past 6 months.

The exhibition is currently open at
Age Exchange - extended until 31st March 2008

Opening Times:
Monday to Friday 10:00 am to 5:00 pm
Saturday 10:00 am to 4:00 pm
Closed Sundays and Bank Holiday Weekends

Entrance is free

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"Inside our street door we had a string with the key on so anyone could pull the string and come in. Then we thought we'd get a bit more posh so we had a chain instead. But if you did that now I don't think you'd have a home left."

Marion Davies

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