More on the area we work in
The Trust supported everything from playgroups, to pensioner clubs and, because it offered training for the management of voluntary groups, its influence rapidly grew far beyond its first boundaries. Organisations like Shadwell Basin project, a water activity centre, and Tower Hamlets Summer University benefited the whole Borough. An Artist in Residence programme for 16 local schools has run for 15 years while a handbook devised for those schools sold throughout the UK and internationally. The Trust helped create the Tower Hamlets Education Business Partnership that builds strong practical links between City companies and local schools.
When the Trust was invited to administer small grant programmes in Tower Hamlets and the adjacent areas of Hackney and Newham it set up panels with local knowledge and expertise and extended its activities throughout the East End. The Trust’s area has grown twenty times. The relatively few inhabitants of the City of London were not forgotten, poverty exists even in that rich square mile.
Historically, the most deprived communities in the country are found in East London. For them deprivation means overcrowding, poverty and illness. With the development of the City and Docklands as leading financial and residential quarters, former mercantile and industrial sites have become centres of prosperity. Multi-million pound apartments stand beside social housing accommodating London’s poorest inhabitants. Over a hundred languages are spoken in these Boroughs and the population contains the highest proportion of young people in the country.
East London is scheduled to be the home of the 2012 Olympic Games. Neglected areas are to be regenerated through sport and entertainment. With 2,000 years of recorded history, a wealth of different cultures represented in art, architecture, music and most of all the ethnic groups that make up the East End, St Katharine & Shadwell Trust works in the most diverse and amazingly mixed area in the world.
