Meet Me at Lewisham Homes

Digital documentation and digital platform

Meet Me at Lewisham Homes is a 3-year project (2017 – 2020) led by the Albany and Entelechy Arts in partnership with Lewisham Homes, supported by the Baring Foundation and Arts Council England’s National Celebrating Age programme. Meet Me at Lewisham Homes is one of a suite of projects in the Meet Me programme, working with formerly isolated older people across Lewisham.

Artist teams have worked alongside older residents at 14 Lewisham Homes Independent Living schemes, developing a total of twelve sustained projects and many more drop in sessions with over 100 participants. Artists and residents have come together in shared lounges to develop projects that have included poetry and spoken word, music, movement, gardening, film and animation, felting, and much more, and projects have been celebrated in events at the Albany, Royal Festival Hall, and Deptford Lounge to name a few. I was commissioned to digitally document the final two projects, and proposed a multi-modal webpage, similar to the one I created for my Lesvos Pathways project.

The Covid-19 pandemic put a pause on the project, and I was only able to make it to half of the planned sessions. As the Sheltered Housing sites locked down, we were no longer able to communicate with residents. My initial one multimodal webpage, suddenly blossomed into building a digital platform to showcase the final two creative encounters, beautifully bought together by the artist teams, as well as creating an archive for three years the project has been active for.

You can enter the online space by clicking here or on the image below - my personal section is title 'Let's get together'.

This was such a lovely project to work on, and it was such a shame it was cut short, both for the residents, but also for everyone working on the project. I hope this is a suitable love letter.

Image Roswitha Chesher