The Modern Cockney Festival was conceived and run by Modern Cockney (formerly Cockney Cultures), a grassroots community partnership between the Bengali East End Heritage Society and Grow Social Capital.
The Bengali East End Heritage Society began in 2016 with an aim to highlight, retain, and restore the Bengali community’s cultural and heritage assets within the East End of London.
Grow Social Capital is a social enterprise working to address the challenge of changing levels in society of social capital- our collective ability to help each other.
The partnership Cockney Cultures is a non-party political, pioneering living heritage and cultural identity project, based on inclusive values.
It works to prompt conversations and celebrations among people who identify as ‘Cockney’ or identify with the values of Cockney and other ‘traditional’ and ‘working-class’ cultures.
In 2022, Cockney Cultures launched ‘Cockney Conversations Month’ providing a range of online events to celebrate and promote Cockney culture. Inspired by the success and positive feedback, a year later, in March 2023, the idea grew into the first Modern Cockney Festival featuring live online and offline events.
Also in March 2023, Cockney Cultures successfully petitioned Tower Hamlets Council to recognise Cockney as a community language – believed to be the first-ever formal recognition of Cockney as a culture in its 660 year-plus history.
To inform the Council how it could introduce Cockney as a community language, Cockney Cultures co-produced a report with the University of Warwick, ‘‘A Cockney Blueprint for Tower Hamlets’ to empower communities, challenge stereotypes, and address social division across London.{Link to Our research]
For this year, the Modern Cockney Festival created a platform for celebrating and promoting a positive sense of ‘who we are’ to break down barriers, build social capital through increased interaction, and share commonality across the multidimensional ‘Cockneydom’- from inner London and throughout the global Cockney Diaspora. Check out the events we ran this year.
Our campaign featured the first-ever National Pie’n’Mash Week, the first generic promotion of the Cockney cuisine. The Week featured the launch of our bid to get Protected Food Status for traditional Pie’n’Mash.
In October 2024 our campaign secured the first-ever debate in the House of Commons on pie’n’mash – check out the story: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd9898lglepo
Do join in and support our campaign.