New exhibition installed at St George’s Hospital
21 January 2025
Towards the end of 2024, St George’s Hospital Charity’s Arts Team were delighted to host a celebration event to mark the unveiling of a brand new display of creative engagement, featuring new artworks made by local residents and local primary school pupils, as part of a new heritage project funded by The National Lottery Heritage Fund: ‘Our Hospital: conserving, curating and responding to St George’s Art and Heritage Collection’.
Over the Summer Term, Arts St George’s worked with local arts organisation Bounce Theatre, to engage over 40 Year 6 pupils at Fircroft Primary School, with St George’s Art and Heritage Collection. The children explored artworks and items from our collection, the heritage of the hospital and their ideas of what the hospital does. The children used a range of activities across four creative sessions led by Bounce Theatre practitioners, including concrete poetry, drama and drawing, to create their own response to the hospital and our collection. For the exhibition, their individual pieces have been brought together into a stunning collaborative collage featuring drawings, words and phrases from the pupils. We were pleased to welcome enthusiastic representatives from the staff and student body at the school to be a part of the celebration event and take photos for their peers.
Alongside our work with younger members of our local community, in Autumn 2024, members of Balham & Tooting Community Association (BATCA) were also invited to find out more about the heritage of St George’s and our collection. The group took part in creative engagement workshops led by our Creative Heritage Resident Artist, Ruan Murphy, to learn more about the hospital’s heritage and make their own creative responses. Sessions included a talk by Tooting History Group, a presentation of historical items by St George’s University London Archives & Special Collections team, a tour of artworks onsite at St George’s Hospital and creative activities including drawing, rubbings, stamp making and gelli printing. It was wonderful to see how proud the participants from BATCA were, as we unveiled their artworks for public display, and to hear how much the project had meant to them.
“The Creative Heritage sessions have opened up a whole new historical and artistic perspective of the hospital to me and I’m 100 per cent enthused!” BATCA Workshops Participant
We would like to thank our partners from this first year of creative heritage engagement– Balham & Tooting Community Association; Archives and Special Collections, City St George's, University of London; St Augustine’s Church; Tooting History Group; Bounce Theatre and Fircroft Primary School.
We are extremely grateful to The National Lottery Heritage Fund for funding and supporting this project. The National Lottery Heritage Fund believes heritage should be valued, cared for and sustained for everyone, now and in the future. As the largest funder for the UK’s heritage they are dedicated to supporting projects that connect people and communities to heritage.
Arts St George's, part of St George's Hospital Charity, is the arts programme for St George's University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. We provide opportunities for patients, visitors, staff and the wider community to engage with creative activities and enjoy cultural experiences, helping improve the experience of being in hospital. To find out more about our work, please click here, or follow us on socials @artsstgeorges.
