Discovery To Independence

In June 2012, the secretary attended the Waltham Forest African Heritage educational centre launch of their exhibition ‘Preserving the heritage of Caribbean, Nigerian and Jamaican people in East London’. This event was held at Leyton Town hall where we met Sandra Shakespeare and Sara Griffiths from the National Archives ‘Caribbean through a Lens Project’ who showed an interest in the work of our Foundation. A meeting was arranged with Sandra Shakespeare the Outreach officer who explained her project brief and how they can support community organisations like us to further our heritage work. We were given access to the thousands of images taken from a photographic collection of Foreign and Commonwealth spanning over 100 years of Caribbean colonial history only released in 2008.

After viewing the images the committee showed an interest and successfully applied for a small grant from the National Archives to make our exhibition ‘From Discovery to Independence – Highlighting a journey of Sugar from the Caribbean to the borough of Newham’. We worked in partnership with Newham Library services and Jenni Munro-Collins (Heritage Local Studies Officer) to have the exhibition tour to all the Libraries in Newham and an official launch at Stratford Library with the deputy Mayor and many supporters.

On this page you will find the exhibition in PDF for you to enjoy as well as the programme and report from the Reminiscence day we held to get community opinions, feedback, newspaper articles and photos from the official launch at Stratford Library.