News and Events
Voyage Windrush Digital Exhibition
We're proud to announce that our Windrush Archive digital exhibition is now live and open for everyone to explore.
This project began with a simple but powerful idea. The stories of the Windrush generation, the people who came to the UK from the Caribbean, deserve to be recorded, protected and shared. Working in partnership with Hackney Archives, Voyage spent 2025 tirelessly capturing memories of arrival, of building new lives in a new country, and of the communities elders helped shape. Those stories were brought together in a book, and now, they have a permanent home online.
"Young People at the Heart of It, From the Very Start"
What makes this project different is who did the work. From the beginning, it was young people who sat down with elders and carried out the interviews themselves, learning to listen, to ask thoughtful questions, and to hold someone else's life story with care. For many of our young people, this was their first real encounter with the Windrush generation's experience told firsthand, not from a textbook, but from the people who lived it.
Too often, young people grow up disconnected from the history that shaped their own communities. Through Voyage, young people learn about the elders who came before them, hearing their stories directly and often for the first time. Many had barely heard of the Windrush generation before this project. They came out of it educated, informed, and inspired to share what they'd learned with others.
That work resulted in a book of elder stories, a record that could easily have stayed on a shelf. Instead, this year, we asked a new group of young people to take it further.
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Building the Digital Exhibition, Together
This year's project brought young people back in, this time to turn that book into a living digital exhibition. It has been a true intergenerational effort. Young people worked page by page through each elder's story, formatting the text, checking archive images, and making sure every detail was accurate and presented with the respect it deserves.
They didn't do this alone. Throughout the project, young people worked alongside mentors who guided them through the process, and with support and guidance from Hackney Archives, whose expertise in archival practice shaped how the material was handled and preserved. The team also spent time working at Cisco, whose venue support and involvement helped power the digital exhibition website development work itself.
Young people are at the heart of everything we do. It's in our name, Voyage stands for Voice Of Youth And Genuine Empowerment, and that's exactly what we strive to do, to give young people a voice, and give them the ability to share the history of their elders, their own history, preserving it for generations to come. So many of these stories could have gone untold.
The result is a project that connects generations in both directions, elders passing their history down, and young people carrying that history forward into a format that will outlast all of us.
Why This Matters
These stories are part of the fabric of this community, and of this country. They are testimonies of resilience, of determination, and of the everyday courage it took to start again somewhere unfamiliar. As the generation who lived through it gets older, projects like this become urgent. If we don't record these stories now, in the words and hands of young people who care about them, we risk losing them for good.
This project has also given our young people something lasting of their own: the experience of interviewing, of archiving, of building something real that other people will use and learn from. Skills in research, communication and technology, built through a project that mattered to them personally.
The Exhibition Is Live Now!
We invite you to take some time, read the stories, and get to know the people who helped build the Hackney we know today. Take a moment too to think about the young people who made sure their stories would never be forgotten.
Click here to view the exhibition!
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