The London Design Festival
On Thursday the 22nd of September our research team joined with a collective of other innovators at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. All teams came to showcase the projects they had been working on as part of the Mayor’s Designing London’s Recovery Programme.
The programme’s core mission is:
- Driving green growth
- Building stronger communities
- Helping Londoners into good work
- Activating our high streets
The Ethnic Food Shop Project
The Ethnic Food Shop Project aimed to tackle two of these key areas, building stronger communities and activating our high streets.
To do this we focused on collecting surveys and interviews from community members and ethnic food business owners and entrepreneurs. We documented and shared (with permission) the personal food stories with the wider public through our social media pages and website through the use of digital recipe cards.
To add value, we then linked up their personal recipes (available on our website) with local food businesses who sell key ingredients necessary for the recipe. We connected with local community leaders such as the Community Brain in Tolworth where we did outreach with the public and spoke about their experiences of food, culture and being part of the Tolworth community.
We did the same in our London high streets: Harringay Green Lanes, Tooting Broadway, Surbiton, Streatham High Street, where our team members engaged their own community networks and met some amazing people.
What’s Happened Since LDF22?
As a direct result of some of the contacts we made at the LDF22 we held a community event on December the 4th 2022, which was a live cooking demonstration in Chinese Jiaozi dumpling making and a community recipe swap. The event was a collaboration with Roehampton University and the Kin-spiration Group, which we have written about in a previous blog post.
Our project is going from strength to strength. The interviews and food surveys are still feeding into our outcomes through the work of our new team member Tara Rudd from About – ROUTES & FROOTS (routesandfroots.com) . We are much more focused than ever on bringing people together in-person and online, celebrating the people who work in food, sharing delicious ethnically diverse food and fostering a larger community.
We are now into creating the 2nd edition of our newsletter ‘Stories of Cooking’ which features updates centred around community recipes, food stories, events, entrepreneurship and more.
You can sign up to our mailing list at the bottom of the page. Look forward to seeing you there!
Author: Sarah Sumpter (Research Assistant)