While the nation’s men’s national football team play in the World Cup, Grow Social Capital is teaming up with Toynbee Hall in Aldgate to celebrate what England means to its people.
Each night of the World Cup tournament from England’s debut game on 17 June to 19 July, Toynbee Hall’s giant 8m wide screen will project a ‘virtual museum’ telling The Story of England in 50 Objects.
Capturing both the historically significant and the everyday in English life – from Stonehenge and Shakespeare to seaside windbreaks – the virtual museum was co-curated with the English public in the run up to this year’s St. George’s Day from 3,000 ideas submitted to the A Very English Chat campaign.
Working with the Jo Cox Foundation’s More in Common Network and other social cohesion groups, the virtual museum aims to start an extended series of conversations, getting people to chat together around what unites people rather than what divides them. Our co-founder, Andy Green, said:
“With many people cheering the England national team, sharing The Story of England in 50 Objects helps everyone better understand what England and Englishness means in an inclusive way, supportive of shared values that bring people together.”
Commenting for Toynbee Hall, Lizzie Stevenson said:
“This virtual museum celebrates England’s inclusive values that enable people to both celebrate a pride in England, and also what unites us as a community”.
The A Very English Chat campaign is an example of our pioneering community storytelling work that enables communities to tell their collective story, and to grow more compelling national narratives around the principles of fairness, inclusivity, democracy, and law.
In the same way a mosaic creates a picture larger than the sum of its parts, our project provided a safe, friendly space enabling people to give themselves permission to explore, through a respectful conversation, a subject that elsewhere can create division and hatred. The campaign is entirely self-funded using a crowdfunder appeal.
Head to the A Very English Chat website to download your free workbooks for The Story of England in 50 Objects and A Very English Chat, and where you can also share your ideas for what tells our own Story of England and Englishness.
Toynbee Hall, founded in 1884 by Samuel and Henrietta Barnett in Aldgate, is the world’s first university settlement and a pioneering centre for social reform. Created to bring future leaders into direct contact with the realities of poverty, it became a catalyst for major advances in welfare, education, and community empowerment, influencing figures such as William Beveridge and Clement Attlee. It supported the campaign earlier in the year with its amazing projections.
Today, Toynbee Hall continues its mission, working alongside people facing poverty and injustice, offering free advice services, community programmes, and research that challenges structural inequality, all while remaining rooted in its original purpose: to build a fairer, more inclusive East London through practical action and social change.
