♥ Client: Arts Catalyst
♥ Collaboration:The Hundreds Club
♥ Year: 2026
♥ Location: London
♥ Collaboration:The Hundreds Club
♥ Year: 2026
♥ Location: London
Building Stories is a participatory project developed with TACO! (Thamesmead Arts and Culture Office), working with children from The Hundred Club, TACO!'s free creative programme for children aged 5 to 12 that uses arts and play to explore social justice issues.
The project starts from a simple premise: where we live shapes how we grow up and how we feel about ourselves. Neighbourhoods, streets, and homes are planned and built by others, and the built environment plays a part in the stories people tell about where they live. Children are rarely invited into these conversations, yet their observations about the places around them offer powerful ways of seeing the city. Thamesmead, a landscape of social housing, large estates, green spaces, and long walking distances, is a place people often make assumptions about. The project gave children who live there space to think about it for themselves.
Across three free workshops, the children moved from the domestic to the civic. In the first, they designed their ideal homes through collage and drawing, later produced as risograph prints in TACO!'s print studio, revealing a precise understanding of what makes a home, light, colour, gardens, quiet corners, and places to be together. In the second, held at the C2K Community Centre, the group built a collective cardboard city from the ground up, negotiating what a city needs alongside what they wanted from one, places to meet, to play, and to be calm. The final workshop turned to storytelling, with each child making an eight-page zine about their block, street, or wider neighbourhood, small accounts of everyday life in Thamesmead told with honesty and humour.
The project culminates in a poster bringing together selected drawings from the workshops alongside a responsive illustration by Sahra Hersi, which gathers the elements the children imagined into a single shared landscape: homes, a school, a community hall, a hospital, a barber shop, a café, a supermarket, a post office, and more besides. The poster is offered back to the children and the wider community, returning the ideas and conversations that emerged during the workshops to the place they came from.
The project starts from a simple premise: where we live shapes how we grow up and how we feel about ourselves. Neighbourhoods, streets, and homes are planned and built by others, and the built environment plays a part in the stories people tell about where they live. Children are rarely invited into these conversations, yet their observations about the places around them offer powerful ways of seeing the city. Thamesmead, a landscape of social housing, large estates, green spaces, and long walking distances, is a place people often make assumptions about. The project gave children who live there space to think about it for themselves.
Across three free workshops, the children moved from the domestic to the civic. In the first, they designed their ideal homes through collage and drawing, later produced as risograph prints in TACO!'s print studio, revealing a precise understanding of what makes a home, light, colour, gardens, quiet corners, and places to be together. In the second, held at the C2K Community Centre, the group built a collective cardboard city from the ground up, negotiating what a city needs alongside what they wanted from one, places to meet, to play, and to be calm. The final workshop turned to storytelling, with each child making an eight-page zine about their block, street, or wider neighbourhood, small accounts of everyday life in Thamesmead told with honesty and humour.
The project culminates in a poster bringing together selected drawings from the workshops alongside a responsive illustration by Sahra Hersi, which gathers the elements the children imagined into a single shared landscape: homes, a school, a community hall, a hospital, a barber shop, a café, a supermarket, a post office, and more besides. The poster is offered back to the children and the wider community, returning the ideas and conversations that emerged during the workshops to the place they came from.