We use craft and film together as tools for community planning, not just outreach. Felting, weaving, embroidery, and collaborative filmmaking let people who might never fill in a consultation form contribute real, detailed knowledge about the place they live in — knowledge that becomes maps, evidence, and decision-making material, not decoration.
Our method
Engagement with our community is something we’ve done every day for years — as local residents, as carers, as parents bringing up children, through conversations with neighbours about what’s actually happening locally. We’ve formalised that instinct into arts-led engagement practice built on over six years of sustained work with the communities who live and work in and around the Kentish Town Development Framework area.
The core method is community mapping: working with local people, often using traditional handicraft skills like felting, weaving, and embroidery, to produce maps that represent local heritage, memory, and identity. Film-making is used alongside or in place of craft as a complementary form of expression and evidence-gathering. In both cases, it’s not just the finished map or film that matters — the activity of making it together builds collaboration and opens a space for new, ground-up ideas to develop that a standard consultation never reaches.
While our focus is Camden, we’ve applied and refined this same method with communities across London, the wider UK, and internationally.
London and the UK
Kentish Town. This is where the method was built: years of mapping workshops, street parties, and school engagement feeding directly into our Murphy’s Yard charrette and its published findings.
Tower Hamlets. From Tower Hamlets to ‘Our Hamlets’ used felted community mapping to prioritise residents’ lived experience, made as part of Queen Mary University of London’s Annual Festival of Communities in 2018 and 2019.
Brixton. In November 2018, at Brixton Library, part of the Being Human Festival, we used a felted community map — made with members of Brixton Housing Co-operative — to tell the story of the co-op’s origins in the aftermath of the 1981 Brixton Riots, and to mark its ongoing contribution to housing in Lambeth. Alongside the map, we screened footage contrasting 1981 Railton Road with the same, now heavily gentrified, street today, and ran our own “gentrification game,” designed to help community-led housing groups develop their own gentrification policy.
Egypt and Jordan
Egypt — Love Letters to Al-Khalifa and Urban Dreams. Love Letters was a place-based heritage filmmaking workshops for young residents of Al-Khalifa, a historic neighbourhood in Cairo. Originally planned in-person and redesigned in 2020 to run over Zoom when Covid-19 made travel impossible — with participants joining from their phones, funded internet credit provided so no one was excluded. When travel restrictions were lifted, we travelled to Cairo to complete the project. Delivered with Megawra Built Environment Collective, and funded by the Centre for Public Engagement at Queen Mary University of London. In 2023 Urban Dreams continued the filmmaking workshops, this time focusing on the connections between urban and natural heritage. Winner of the International Union of Architects (UIA) 2023 Golden Cubes Award. In partnerships with Megawra Built Environment Collective, Film Geographies and Metafilmes. Funded by Landscapes of Hope.
Jordan and Egypt: Wadi Faynan and the Sinai. Members of the Camden Community Makers team ran a series of community engagement projects in Wadi Faynan in southern Jordan and in the Sinai in Egypt, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and based at Queen Mary University of London. Using collaborative filmmaking and handicraft, we worked with local communities to produce short animated films and maps drawing on local weaving, embroidery and felting traditions.
Join us
If you’d like to find out more about our engagement work, or bring this method to your own community get in touch.