Becontree Plaques Nominations

A series of bespoke plaques by artist Leonor Antunes have been unveiled across the Becontree Estate, celebrating ‘Becontree Heroes’ chosen by local residents.

I led Create London’s community consultation, launching an estate~wide nominations process to find a diverse range of residents who played an important role within their communities, in addition to more well~known figures from Becontree history. We reached out to youth groups, elders groups, faith groups and community centres, as well as the borough archives, and worked with a panel of residents and ward councillors who selected from over 150 nominations.

The final recipients and locations included the site of Becontree’s first mosque, a food bank that supported hundreds of families throughout the pandemic, an older couple that had fostered countless children in the borough, and the Ford factory strikers instrumental in the fight for equal pay for women.

The project empowered local people to choose who was commemorated, amplifying discussions around who is missing from the formal archives, whose achievements we remember, and who gets to decide.

Find out more here.‍

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^{Becontree Plaques by Leonor Antunes was commissioned by Create London and London Borough of Barking and Dagenham. Part of Becontree Forever, a programme celebrating 100 years of the Becontree Estate in 2021.}