"Bringing Down the Walls: Co-constructing intergenerational community and place in North Woolwich"

Surrounded by the Thames, with a backdrop of London City Airport, Canary
Wharf and enclosed by buildings such as the Excel Centre, North Woolwich is
a residential pocket - seemingly forgotten and trapped amidst regeneration
efforts, which sought to attract global investors to the post-industrial
docklands from the 1980s onwards. As a consequence of area regeneration,
which neglected improvements to the existing community, North Woolwich
today is a site of 'glocalisation' - where wealth and poverty, connectivity and
disconnection, and generation and ethnicity meet in a postindustrial place
(Graham and Marvin, 2001). This project seeks to address elements of North
Woolwich's fragmented community through a practice which goes back
thousands of years, to the dawn of civilisation: storytelling.
Employing a mix of arts-based, ethnographic, and qualitative research
methods, the project aims to understand various generations' experiences,
sense of belonging, and aspirations in North Woolwich, before sharing these
sentiments in a series of storytelling events. It will explore the effectiveness
of storytelling to transform intergenerational connections, and the extent to
which it reframes individual and collective narratives both during and after
the events. Through the poetic lens of storytelling, this research seeks not
only to understand but also to bring down psychosocial walls that, in turn,
may contribute to breaking down the physical walls faced by the community.