Newham has a habit of popping up through London’s music heritage. It’s been a crucible for multiple generations, working across all manner of genres – from Kano’s street level raps to the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal; from grime’s pirate radio energy through to Bengali community groups.
New project Sound Waves: Music In Newham aims to spotlight this. Pieced together by Rendezvous Projects and funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, it’s an in-depth look at Newham’s musical heritage, uncovering some hidden stories in the process.
An interactive website has launched, while a series of exhibitions have been installed at Plaistow libraries, showcasing listening posts, community photo archives, and interactive maps, alongside talks, guided walks, and community events.
Tales of creativity, resilience, and community, Sound Waves is accompanied by a limited edition book – introduced by journalist, archivist, and broadcaster Emma Warren – with its six chapters exploring 60 years of Newham’s music history, illustrated with rare photographs and first-hand accounts.
Clash spoke to Emma Warren and Katherine Green – social documentary photographer and co-director of Rendezvous Projects CIC – about the project.
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What first caught your attention about the new Sound Waves: Music In Newham project?
Emma Warren: I’ve been a fan of Rendezvous Projects’ work since they published Sweet Harmony, which told the story of Waltham Forest’s pirate radio stations. It’s a booklet which contains quotes from people who were there, and it’s wrapped in a beautifully designed map covered in QR codes that take you direct to recordings of shows. It’s one of the publications I always bring along with me when I run Document Your Culture workshops. So when they told me about this project, and asked me to write the introduction, I said yes straight away.
What is your personal association with the area? Any particular music or clubbing memories stand out?
Emma Warren: I’ve got more connection with the music that came out of Newham than Newham itself. Tunes like ‘We Are I.E’ and ‘Six Million Ways to Die’ are some of the biggest and baddest ever to hit the dancefloor. I’m a fan of FOLD – it’s so good to see a proper venue, acting in that long lineage of proper venues in London.
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It’s vital to document cultural history before it fades – were there any particular challenges in writing this book / contributing to the project?
Emma Warren: There’s always a risk that work like this could be extractive. People’s memories, and their shoebox archives are precious and valuable. So yes, it is important to document cultural history but it’s even more important that the work is done collaboratively. The history of documenting culture isn’t always positive and is often done by people with more structural power than the people whose stories are being told. So that’s always a challenge, and always needs to be reckoned with. As well as appreciating the work Rendezvous Projects do, I’ve got a lot of respect for Desiree Reynolds and her work in Sheffield around Dig Where You Stand, which they describe as an archival justice movement. For me, writing the introduction, I wanted to try and articulate why these stories matter, and why they matter now.
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The project looks beyond commercially successful genres, giving as broad an overview as possible. One through line is the importance of music in both generating and reflecting communal experiences. Why do you think that’s so strong in Newham?
Katherine Green: Newham’s identity has always been shaped by movement and migration. As a working-class borough by the docks, it drew people from across the UK and around the world who came to work in the factories and industries of East London. Those shifting populations brought different musical traditions, which constantly met, mixed and evolved.
Music became a way of expressing identity and belonging – especially for second-generation migrants who were navigating between cultures. It was also a way for communities to come together and find strength in the face of social and economic hardship. When you don’t have much materially, you make things happen with creativity and collaboration. That’s been the story of Newham: people building culture from the ground up, supporting one another, and turning shared struggle into shared celebration.
Did any particular scene or sound surprise you?
Katherine Green: Newham is full of surprises. One of my favourite discoveries was the story of the Ruskin Arms, a legendary rock pub known for bands like Iron Maiden and Status Quo in the 1970s and 80s. In the late 1980s it was taken over by Jack Singh Sandhu, who offered the upstairs space to a friend to start a community radio station for the South Asian community. Downstairs in one bar you had a hardcore rock crowd, and in the bar in the back, Punjabi musicians and upstairs, DJs broadcasting to Newham’s Asian community – two completely different scenes happily coexisting under one roof. I mean it kind of wasn’t a surprise, but I’m surprised the story isn’t better known.
Just the depth of Newham’s connection to the Asian Underground which flourished in the 90s. Artists like Asian Dub Foundation – whose ‘New Way, New Life’ video was filmed on Green Street – were rooted here. Their frontman at the time, Deedar Zaman, grew up in Forest Gate. He became part of Joi Bangla before joining his brother Saifullah “Sam” Zaman’s State of Bengal collective. Central bands and figures to the Asian Underground. We also found out that Talvin Singh launched his club night Anokha from a party at Clays Lane Estate, Stratford. That was particularly incredible to hear as that was one of my favourite clubs in the 90s.
And finally, the sheer impact and importance of youth clubs. Again and again, people spoke about how vital they were as spaces to play, perform, and discover music – often with lifelong impact.
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The personal testimony in the book is vivid and often quite moving. What was the process of researching and collecting that like?
Katherine Green: Rendezvous Projects works deeply within communities, and oral history is at the heart of our approach. We trained a team of volunteers, many from Newham themselves, to collect stories through interviews. We find people through social media, traditional marketing and word of mouth. We’re really proactive in finding people to speak to, so that we uncover those more hidden voices.
We really tried to get a true cross-section: a balance across decades, genres, genders and communities – I have to say that’s been a massive challenge just because of the breadth of diversity in the borough and the amount of time we were covering. Our volunteers were trained by an Oral History Society tutor, so the process was rooted in careful listening and respect for each person’s experience.
We’ve now recorded over seventy oral histories. Together they create an incredible tapestry, people who ran youth clubs, played in bands, DJed, or simply went out dancing. Once you start to map those stories, you see patterns emerging, but you also realise how many histories have never been documented before.
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The Ruskin Arms has such a rich history, perhaps worth a book on its own. How did you approach telling its story in such a distinct fashion?
Katherine Green: That was one of the hardest to balance. Venues like the Ruskin or the Bridge House already have quite a lot of coverage, while others – like the Rex or Kerala House – have little cohesive documentation. So we focused on what hadn’t been told before.
At the Ruskin, that was the mix of South Asian culture and metal under one roof, an great example of Newham’s cultural intersections. We tried to draw those threads together, telling familiar stories from new perspectives and giving space to the voices that haven’t usually been heard.
The intersection of anti-racist and anti-fascist groups with musicians is truly inspiring and feels timely. What made Newham such a potent place for resistance?
Katherine Green: In the 1970s, Newham had one of the highest National Front memberships in the country. Racism and violence were real and visible, many people talk about NF recruitment at school gates. At the same time, the borough was rapidly diversifying as new communities moved in to work in the factories and docks.
Out of that tension came solidarity. Local people organised: in 1980 the Newham Monitoring Project was founded to document racist attacks and police abuses and to support victims. They are an incredible organisation who deserves a project in their own right .
Rock Against Racism chose to stage their inaugural gig there, precisely because of the high numbers of NF activity in the area. They took a real risk but an important one and demonstrated loudly and proudly that racism was not welcome.
Musicians, artists and community activists often overlapped, using culture as a form of resistance.
That sense of people standing up for each other feels very current again. Sound Waves aims to show how creativity and collaboration can turn adversity into something positive and how diversity has made British culture richer in every sense.
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Radio plays a recurring role in Newham’s music history. Do you have any memories of Déjà Vu? What made Newham such fertile ground for broadcasting, pirate or otherwise?
Katherine Green: There’s always been a pioneering, risk-taking spirit in Newham. People were willing to bend the rules a little to make things happen. The borough’s high-rise estates made it ideal for pirate radio transmitters, and the dense population meant audiences were right on the doorstep.
That combination of creativity, defiance and accessibility bred innovation. My own memories are of Centreforce in the late 1980s and Deja Vu in the 90s both broadcasting from the borough. It opened up a whole world to me. Stations like that connected people and gave a voice to underground music long before the internet. And Deja in particular had such a raw energy and sense of experimentation with their live clashes. Looking back at those videos from their rooftop of EQ now, you’re watching culture growing and developing live.
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You close by profiling FOLD, one of London’s most vital clubs right now. Those spaces are continually under threat. What can looking at Newham’s past teach us about managing the present?
Katherine Green: One of the strongest lessons is how much creative risk relies on support. When you look back, you see how vital funding was from the GLC, local councils and the Arts Council – you can directly see the positive impact that had and what it led to. Places like the Tom Allen Centre in Stratford, where Goodness Gracious Me was developed and with Nitin Sawhney first performed, existed because artists were given space and security to experiment.
Affordable housing and cooperative living also made a huge difference – Benjamin Zephaniah, for example, helped set up housing associations so many artists and creatives could live and work in the area. Without that kind of support, only the privileged can afford to create.
We need to rediscover that understanding: that artists and venues are essential to community life, not luxuries. They generate cultural and economic value, but more than that, they bring people together. If there’s one message from Sound Waves, it’s that connection, creativity and community are inseparable, and they all need nurturing.
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