About

Footprints of Love is a living archive of LGBTQ+ Newham – the people, places and moments that made this borough home.

We’re gathering the stories that have lived in memory and photo albums for decades – the pubs, the protests, the community centres, the quiet acts of care – and giving them a permanent place in Newham’s official heritage collection. Some of the people who shaped this history are no longer with us. Their voices remain here.

How it began

Footprints of Love grew out of a pilot. In 2024, for Newham Heritage Month, Cameye Arts created Footprints of LGBTQIA+ Humans in Stratford – a small project with a simple aim: to peel back the layers and surface the rich, hidden, vibrant queer history of the borough. We focused on Stratford, and on listening. We found five people who had lived in Newham for thirty years or more, and we recorded their memories – no set questions, just curiosity and time.

What they shared became the seed of everything you see here. Those conversations, photographs and flyers showed us how much was at risk of being lost, and how much there was to celebrate. Footprints of Love is how we carry that work forward – across the whole borough, and into the permanent archive.

What we believe

Queer history is local history. It happened on these streets – in a pub on Romford Road, a bookshop on West Ham Lane, a helpline run from someone’s front room in Stratford Village. When these stories are written down and kept, they stop being something privately remembered and become something a borough officially holds. That is the work: not nostalgia, but record. Making sure the people who built queer Newham are findable, named, and honoured by the generations who come after them.

What we’re doing

We record filmed oral histories with elders and long-term residents. We digitise the fragile things – newsletters, flyers, photographs, ephemera – before they’re lost. We make short films about queer places and spaces. We run walking tours and workshops that bring younger and older generations into the same room. And we’re building this archive in the open, so it can keep growing.

This is a living archive. It will never quite be finished – and that’s the point.

Working in partnership

Footprints of Love is led by Cameye Arts CIC, a women-led arts organisation bringing together documentary filmmaking, community engagement and heritage interpretation. We work in partnership with Newham Heritage Service, who ensure the collection is preserved to archival standard and kept accessible for generations to come, and with oral history specialists On The Record, who help us capture these stories with the care they deserve.