"Bringing Down the Walls: Co-constructing intergenerational community and place in North Woolwich"

Surrounded by the Thames, with a backdrop of London City Airport, Canary Wharf and enclosed by buildings such as the Excel Centre, North Woolwich is a residential pocket - seemingly forgotten and trapped amidst regeneration efforts, which sought to attract global investors to the post-industrial docklands from the 1980s onwards. As a consequence of area regeneration,

which neglected improvements to the existing community, North Woolwich today is a site of 'glocalisation' - where wealth and poverty, connectivity and disconnection, and generation and ethnicity meet in a postindustrial place (Graham and Marvin, 2001). This project seeks to address elements of North

Woolwich's fragmented community through a practice which goes back thousands of years, to the dawn of civilisation: storytelling. Employing a mix of arts-based, ethnographic, and qualitative research methods, the project aims to understand various generations' experiences, sense of belonging, and aspirations in North Woolwich, before sharing these

sentiments in a series of storytelling events. It will explore the effectiveness of storytelling to transform intergenerational connections, and the extent to which it reframes individual and collective narratives both during and after the events. Through the poetic lens of storytelling, this research seeks not

only to understand but also to bring down psychosocial walls that, in turn, may contribute to breaking down the physical walls faced by the community.