About Us
The Deptford Peoples Heritage Museum is a Black-led, volunteer-run museum without walls.
What?
The Deptford People's Heritage Museum was founded by community organisers, a stone's throw from the Deptford Docks in London - currently the contested site of a major real estate development, and historical point of departure for ships associated with the violence and de-humanisation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, East India Company and the plantation system.
Developed with community groups including a food bank, women’s support collectives, health and racial justice advocates and other locally led initiatives, the Museum ‘collection’ includes maps, walks, study groups and objects narrated by people who live and work in the surrounding area, and who negotiate the diasporic legacies of the UKs colonial history in their everyday lives.
Together, we trace histories and links to and from Deptford, tell the stories of local resistance and struggles for freedom, and plot these histories in relation to contemporary issues facing our community and others around the world.
The museum is governed by a “village ethos”, involving current and ancestral voices in its ongoing process of museum-making excavating relationships between the past, present and future.
Who? The Village Ethos.
The Museum is volunteer run and governed by a ‘village ethos’. It is first and foremost accountable to its surrounding community.
Through open local assemblies, themes, issues and processes are put in place on a short and long term basis.
Study groups are led by local people and organisations who engage in the development and realisation of routes through the local area.
A weekly meeting takes place for those currently working on projects to check in, support one another and help to evolve the ongoing development of the museum.
Study groups include diasporic communities in Deptford and abroad; individuals and organisations engaged in local memory work around the dockyard and its naval and colonial histories; local educators and students, community organisers, campaigning groups activists and others.
Ghosts
We engage with histories of the Docks and our local area in ways that link the past to the conjunctures of the present and its possible futures.
This work includes our ancestors, who are honoured and kept alive by what Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes as an ‘infrastructure of feeling’, collective remembering, sharing information, caring for each other and providing support in the face of the struggles of the past as they live with us in the present.
The ancestors compel us to ensure that those alive today do not forget the past so that we may build from their struggles.
Our acts of collective walking, reading, making, moving and mapping enmesh these struggles with our own in the here and now.
How?
i. Open Door
We have an open door policy (without the door). People are invited to drop in to our weekly meetings and, where resources permit, initiate a process of study, bring material for an existing area of work and/or engage with studies that relate to the histories of the Deptford docks, their own cultures and questions related to the struggles of the past and the present. We are a voluntary organisation so we do what we can to support within our capacity.
ii. Collective Learning
The Museum’s study groups and programmes exist for community members to learn about each other and our histories both in Deptford and in the parts of the world we are connected to.
Plotting these connections helps us to think about the stories. how they were shaped by historical events. Linking these journeys to our lives in the present helps us to prioritise what we need and what we should fight for.
Collective education is at the centre of the Museum - we teach each other and extend what we have learned with younger generations, through school learning packs and mentorship, online material, partnering with local colleges and universities beginning from the issues people face now to work back to their various histories.
We are currently mentoring Sir James Hatcham Primary School to develop a permanent children’s museum engaging with inter-connections between the past, present and future of the area and working with secondary students on a curriculum for use by their teachers.
iii. Pop Up Exhibitions and Events
We are a museum without walls. In order to instigate moments of intensive community discussion, we host events.
These take the form of Pop Up discussions. exhibitions, mapping sessions and walks inviting people to talk about their experiences and how they connect to the past.
We take part in annual events honouring enslaved people who have been buried in Lewisham and beyond.
In order to make the collection visible we mark histories at the community sites. Exhibitions are moments to reflect and engage with material culture or a theme of local importance drawn from our regular assemblies, and to plan actions around this in the future.
Our first exhibition, Chip on Your Shoulder, took place in October-November 2020 at Pepys Resource Centre and looked at the poor conditions of naval ship-builders alongside the extractive and violent histories of enslavement as a trajectory of exploitation linking communities often seen as separate.
For International Women’s Week 2021, the Museum organised Women in Transition, a series of events bringing women together to discuss their experiences, responses and largely unrecognised labour in supporting their families and communities during Covid-19.
June of the same year was the time for Rights of Passage: Intergenerational Music and History Exchanges between London and Dakar, in which young and older people in Deptford and Dakar worked together to develop an online multi-media project linking histories of the representation of the trans-atlantic slavery in London and Dakar, alongside a sonic enquiry into the musical strategies used to resist oppression and keep African cultural traditions alive.
In 2023 we hosted a pop-up exhibition at The Calabash Centre focused on Black-led spaces in Lewisham.
This included pictures of buildings that have been closed or struggle to maintain their autonomy.
Community members responded, suggesting other spaces that should be included, and sharing the impact of closures on their capacity to self organise.
iv. Tracing Lines
From Deptford we trace lines to other parts of the world.
Through a collaboration with Cheikh Anta Diop University, youth organisers, and the nascent Museum of Maritime Resistance in Dakar, we are building a series of intergenerational exchanges between young people living and studying in Deptford/Lewisham and those in Senegal, thinking together about the legacies of enslavement and de-enslavement that live in the present.
We also seek out relationships with other community museums and self-organised collections and practitioners in the UK and abroad.
v. Cultural Studies approach
We understand culture as a site from which to look at the points of intersection and connection between our lived experiences of struggle.
We analyse the past through the lens of the relations of power that dominate our present.
vi. Routes
Our museum operates by making routes.
Through our projects with different community groups, we select places that are meaningful to them, their histories, and the thematics encompassed by our work together - we connect these locations by drawing new shapes that are then added to our map.