Celebrating Modern Cockney Identity Through Poetry and Heritage
One of our co-founder Directors, Mark Ereira-Guyer reflects on his Cockney heritage and talks about the ways we are supporting inclusive Cockneys to celebrate their shared identities through poetry.
Modern Cockney Festival, a cultural community group we have been supporting through our 'Nurturing Grassroots' programme, hosted a wonderful online workshop about tracing your family history. It triggered a flurry of home based research. Across three centuries I discovered family roots - over countless generations - in Shadwell’s Cable Street area, then around Bethnal Green, Stepney, Spitalfields - and latterly Dagenham and Ilford.
I've always identified as coming from London’s Cockney (aka the non-posh Londoner) heartlands but the extent of this long heritage threw me somewhat. Personally, I find myself somewhere between ‘Old School’ and ‘New School’ Cockney, and examining my own family trees I’ve found abundant ancestral Cockney fruits everywhere. They jiggle and jangle along with my deep 16th century Portuguese refugee heritage and those Irish fleeing starvation in the 1840s Potato Famine. When I was young boy my maternal grandmother who was born and lived just off Cable street, before moving to Dagenham, often spoke of her memories of the Battle of Cable Street in 1936. My maternal grandfather was born on Shadwell Place, spitting distance from where the fascists were chased away by the local community.
Andy Green & Saif Osmani
So Cockney is my tribe, my identity. My Cockney is aspiring working-class, inclusive, kind and generous. It has been such a joy to work with Modern Cockney Festival’s brave founders Andy Green and Saif Osmani. They shared with me their concepts of ‘inclusive tribalism”, which is a modern Cockney identity based on positive inclusive values celebrating an evolving sense of community comprising people from diverse backgrounds, cultures and beliefs. Like them, I want to see this as a powerful resource for bringing people together, standing together to protect common interests and using a communal heritage and narrative which is resourceful, resilient and witty. Also, because like so many people who had moved out from London’s east end into Essex, Cambridgeshire and Suffolk (where I now live) I can’t help feeling that the Cockney diaspora by embracing this modern sense of identity has so much to contribute to creating a vibrant sense of Togetherness. Of course, there is always the equal risk that it pulled into the cul-de-sac of social division by nefarious forces and charlatans - and this is why I believe the work we are doing at Civil Society Together is so urgent.
With my Civil Society Together hat on and as a local community activist, I’ve again caught up with my Cockney diaspora brothers and sisters in small towns like Thetford (working on an assignment with British Trust for Ornithology) and in Haverhill last year, when I helped my daughter and fellow co-founder, deliver a workshop designed to tackle loneliness and boost social connection. Both East Anglian towns have a rich history of new Cockney residents coming from London and making their lives there, creating an energetic sense of community and social solidarity. All my recent time spent in Haverhill has really sparked further ‘life writing - poems and prose miniatures - which is part and parcel of my own wellbeing and creative health.
We’re now in an exciting and collaborative position to mix this all up and together. Working with several partners including Modern Cockney Festival, United East End and Together on Cable Street - the latter this year celebrating the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street (when a united community chased out Mosley’s fascist Blackshirts) - we have launched a small poetry project THE NEW COCKNEY POETS. We’re encouraging everyone to write a poem on two themes:
Modern Cockney identities & Cockney Diaspora
Unity & Comradeship of East End Communities (in celebration of the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street)
Find out more about The New Cockney Poets project/competition here
This will all culminate in a POETRY SLAM event at St George-in-the-east church, just off Cable Street on 4th October, led by Michael Rosen and our Poetess-in-residence Ovyuki.
Register to attend the Poetry Slam event here
Working closely with Andy and Saif, at the Modern Cockney Festival we now also aim to take their catalytic and inspiring vision for inclusion and togetherness across England, and build positive narratives around all the amazing regional identities and cultures there we have in England. through A VERY ENGLISH CHAT
Photos from the launch of A Very English Chat in April 2026 (Left: Billy Bragg, A Cockney Pearly Queen & CST co-founder Natasha Ereira-Guyer, Right: Modern Cockney Festival co-founders, Saif and Andy)
