Modern Cockney Festival brings Cockneydom into the 21st Century with a call out to challenge traditional perceptions and embrace your ‘inner Cockney’
A celebration of the culture, heritage, and future of ‘non-posh Londoners’ is taken place with the second Modern Cockney Festival during March to challenge traditional perceptions and negative stereotypes while offering new ways of inspiring people to connect with their regional identities in Britain.
It highlights how the modern idea of ‘Cockney’ goes beyond its ‘Old School’ heartlands; how ‘Bow Bells is heard through the heart’; and includes a Cockney Diaspora mainly found in a region called ‘Cockneydom’ – spanning much of the south east of England – defined by the spread of traditional Pie’n’Mash shops serving the Cockney staple dish.
The Festival celebrates an identity that spans generations, as well as what it calls a ‘New School Cockney’, of the latest cultures emerging from every new wave of non-posh Londoners.
Complex social identities in Britain
The event recognises how social identities in modern-day Britain are nowadays more complex and multi-layered where people are more likely to define themselves by a fusion of labels, such as Cockney Bengali, Cockney Black, Essex or Kent Cockney and many more different cocktails of identity.
Such is the complexity of the modern Cockney identity, Cockney Cultures – a partnership between the Bengali East End Heritage Society and social enterprise Grow Social Capital CIC who run the Modern Cockney Festival – has devised a ‘Cockney Formula’ that identifies an intricate inter-relationship between 52 different variables that create what we know as ‘Cockney’.
Comedian Arthur Smith puts its more simply: ‘non-posh Londoners’
Tackling cliches, debunking stereotypes
Tackling popular misconceptions, the Festival goes beyond traditional perceptions and stereotypes, such as rhyming slang or on-screen villains, to spotlight a vibrant, evolving, thriving culture based on positive, inclusive values of resilience and defiance, resourcefulness, underpinned by a stoic and irreverent wit, qualities to help people feel stronger, more powerful and purposeful, more together with others, to overcome adversity and setbacks in modern-day life.
Last year, Cockney Cultures succeeded in petitioning Tower Hamlets Council to recognise Cockney as a community language and has just delivered a co-produced report with the University of Warwick, A Cockney Blueprint for Tower Hamlets, to guide the Council on implementing its new policy.
Campaigners are hoping the Modern Cockney Festival will serve as a stepping-stone to encourage similar month-long non-posh peoples’ festivals across the UK and internationally, to celebrate their cultures, heritages, and futures.
Festival programme
Featuring over a dozen events the Modern Cockney Festival’s highlights include:
- The launch of a virtual Modern Cockney Museum telling ‘The Story of Cockney in 50 Objects’ being projected every night of the Festival on a giant screen outside Toynbee Hall, Aldgate. There will also be a ‘museum in a pocket’ with a specially-produced deck of cards telling the story.
- The first-ever National Pie’n’Mash Week (11-17 March) celebrating the traditional Cockney cuisine.
- The first Modern Cockney Kids festival with family-friendly events at the Museum of London Docklands and the Whitechapel Gallery.
- Speak Cockney Day on Sunday 3 March (the ‘fird of the ‘fird)
- Talks covering subjects such as:
- How being a Cockney is good for your health, with one of the country’s leading wellbeing expertsis Cockney dying or evolving? With rare recordings from the British Library
- Inspiring Cockney Women and the launch of an award celebrating the achievement of women in overcoming adversity and gender bias
- Cockney humour being explored with comedian Arthur Smith
- The future of street markets
- The 300-year-old story of Black Cockneys
- Social prejudice faced by Cockneys in the creative industries
- Discrimination against working class cultures
- Ruby Murray – the story of Curry and Cockneys
- Encouraging children to design a ‘Cockney kilt’ at the Modern Cockney Kids Festival
- Inspiring Cockneys around the world to create their own ‘bubble events’ wherever they live to celebrate their Cockney identity
Bow Bells are heard through the heart
Commenting on the forthcoming Festival, Saif Osmani of Cockney Cultures said,
“Cockney is alive and well, although evolving and different to many people’s perceptions and stereotypes. A Cockney identity is an emotional connection, an affinity with the ‘non-posh Londoner’, where ‘Bow Bells are heard through the heart.’ The Festival serves as a call out to all Cockneys, who connect with the 660 year-old identity, to embrace their inner Cockney”
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Join us at the Museum of London Docklands, West India Quay, London E14 4AL to discover the delights of Cockney rhyming slang, the history of the Pearly Kings and Queens, and fun family activities including designing a Cockney bowler hat, kilt, or burka with the organisers of the Modern Cockney Festival, and the Pearly King and Queen of Woolwich.
