The Archive

The record. The actual things – photographs, recordings, newsletters, the paper that survived. Some of it fragile, some of it nearly lost. We’re digitising it, caring for it, and placing it into Newham’s permanent heritage collection at Newham Heritage Service, so it can’t disappear again.

Small today. Growing steadily. Look around.

Featured: the GEMMA collection

GEMMA was a national group for disabled and able-bodied gay women, formed in 1976. It was built largely here in Newham by Elsa Beckett (1939-2018) and her life partner, Kathryn Bell – at its height more than a hundred members, a quarterly newsletter, and Findings, an anthology of its members’ own stories, poems and articles. It linked women who were too often isolated twice over, by disability and by prejudice, and insisted their information reach them directly – on tape, in Braille, without a social worker in between.

Elsa, who wrote the group’s founding article, named its aim plainly: not to grow, but to make itself unnecessary – “we would like our group to become obsolete.”

Kathryn Bell died in 2025, aged 91. Until this project, she had never been formally interviewed about her years of activism. These filmed conversations are among the last records of her telling that story in her own voice – including Kathryn reading her own short story, Coming Out in the Post Office. We’re honoured to hold them, and to keep GEMMA’s story alive.

The collection begins here, with Kathryn’s films and a set of the group’s writing and newsletters. In time, we hope to care for the wider archive – the artworks, books, tapes and photographs GEMMA gathered across the years.

(images: GEMMA’s anthology of members’ writing, “Findings,” and a set of the group’s newsletters – courtesy of GEMMA)

The East London Gay Community

The ELGC was a social group with a strong women’s membership, and from 1978 it ran a helpline from Maiden Road, in the heart of Stratford Village. Alongside the conversation on our Queer Spaces page, the archive holds some of the printed things it left behind – its newsletter, sent out to keep a scattered community connected.

We’re starting with one cover here, from November 1984, and will add more over time.

(image: East London Gay Community newsletter, November 1984 – courtesy of Martin P.J. Edwardes)

Theatre Royal Stratford East

A landmark in Stratford for well over a century, the Theatre Royal has its own queer history on its stage. Among the pieces held here is a flyer for its Sunday Cabaret – an evening of “songs, sketches, variety and drag,” drawn by the cartoonist Larry – a glimpse of the theatre’s long, easy embrace of queer performance.

(image: Sunday Cabaret flyer – “Songs! Sketches! Variety! Drag!” – Theatre Royal Stratford East, drawn by Larry. Courtesy of Newham Heritage Service) and ((image: “Blood of Angels” – The Shadow Syndicate perform Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, Tom Allen Centre, Stratford. Courtesy of Newham Heritage Service)

More – oral histories, photographs and audio – is added here as the archive grows.

Add to the archive

Have something that belongs here – a photograph, a flyer, an object, a memory? Share your story, or get in touch at people@cameyearts.org.