POETRY WORKSHOP: QUEER MAPS OF NEWHAM: STORIES, STREETS, AND FUTURE

Led by Sonia of Newham Poetry Group, this poetry workshop invited participants to reflect on belonging, a simple word that holds survival, memory, and hope. Through gentle, place-based prompts, participants created poems that mapped their personal journeys across East London: its streets, meeting points, childhood memories, chosen families, languages carried across borders, and the everyday moments of queerness that shape life in the borough.

Some participants shared their poems aloud—voices sometimes trembling, sometimes defiant—discovering how stories can soften distance and build connection. There was laughter too, a reminder that joy itself can be a form of resistance. In a hyper-digital and often disconnected world, gathering to write, listen, and reflect together became a quietly radical act of community-making.

Some of the poems created during the session will be selected for the community time capsule, becoming a future reminder of how queer lives shaped Newham in 2026: our hopes, our challenges, our joys, and the traces we leave in the places we call home.

“Facilitating this workshop reminded me that creativity needs care. In a warm, quiet and safe space, people opened up and words began to flow. As a facilitator, you can feel how the room itself supports the creative process. Our communities need more spaces like this, places where people feel safe enough to reflect, create and belong.” Sonia from Newham Poetry Group

Here is one of the poems created in the session.

“Belonging is Not a Postcode” By Sophia 

Belonging is not a postcode.
Not E15, not E7, not the number on your tenancy agreement.

Belonging is the smell of fried onions from the market,
rain on concrete,
the sound of three languages in one bus queue.

It is the library that held you
when nothing else did.

It is the protest you didn’t plan to join
but stayed for.

It is carrying your mother’s accent
like fragile glass
and realising it does not need protecting.

Belonging is not permission.
It is repetition.
Showing up.
Again.
And again.

It is saying:
“I am here.”
Even when the scaffolding says otherwise.

East London does not ask where you are from.
It asks:
Will you stay?
Will you care?
Will you fight for what should belong to all of us?

Belonging is not given.
It is built.