Deptford People's Heritage Museum is one of 10 London groups to win a Sites of Memory grant, for an audio walk and a school curriculum on the dockyard's colonial past.
A Deptford community museum has won funding to research and share the history of the royal dockyard and its links to the transatlantic slave trade. Deptford People’s Heritage Museum is the only Lewisham group among the 10 picked for the Mayor of London’s Sites of Memory grants.
The Mayor’s office announced the grants on Friday 23 October. Each group gets up to £10,000, paid for by The National Lottery Heritage Fund.
What the Deptford project will do
The museum’s project is called Monumenting Deptford Dockyard: Past, Present, Future. The Mayor’s office says it will produce:
- an audio walk
- a school curriculum
The Sites of Memory page says the project “builds on five years of community-led work exploring how Deptford’s colonial history should be remembered”.
Joyce Jacca, the museum’s founder and director, said in the Mayor’s announcement: “We’re very excited for this opportunity to work with our community to link the past, present and future of Deptford Dockyard. We will be documenting its colonial past, its legacies in the present and practices of resistance used by African, Caribbean and other ancestral communities living in the former Dockyard’s immediate environment.”
Who runs the museum
The museum describes itself as Black-led. It is based in the Pepys Resource Centre, close to the old docks. It was set up in 2021, alongside a food bank and other projects started by local women, in response to the Black Lives Matter protests.
Its collection is made by people who live nearby. It says it is accountable first to its surrounding community, through open local assemblies and a weekly meeting for people working on its projects. The Mayor’s office calls it a “museum-without-walls”.
How the grants work
The grant scheme had £100,000 to share. The terms were:
- up to £10,000 per group
- groups had to be based in Greater London, active for at least a year, with an income of £100,000 or less
- projects run from October 2026 and must be finished by March 2028
The research has a second purpose. It will help pick places for a network of smaller memorial markers across London. These will link back to The Wake, the city’s planned memorial to victims of transatlantic slavery.
The Wake, by artist Khaleb Brooks, is a bronze cowrie shell nearly seven metres high. It will stand at West India Quay in Docklands. The Mayor’s office says it won planning permission this month.
The other London projects
The 10 groups are spread across nine boroughs. Others include a touring exhibition in Camden on law, slavery and freedom, a research project in Waltham Forest, and five guided walking tours of the City of London. The full list is on the Mayor’s website.
What it means for you
The project runs until March 2028, so the audio walk and the curriculum are some way off. If you live near the old dockyard and want to take part, the museum works through open assemblies and local working groups. You can reach it through its own website, which links to its Instagram and Facebook pages.
Schools in Deptford and New Cross may want to ask the museum about the curriculum while it is still being written.
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