People Powered Places: We need your vote!
Culture Within Newham would like to turn everyday spaces like laundrettes and chicken shops into art venues through four collaborative projects that link artists, non-art spaces, and our local communities.
Imagine your local bus covered in Pakistani truck art, or watching a theatre performance through the window of your local barbershop. Or a drum band marching down the aisles of your nearest supermarket, or a circus crew taking over your neighbourhood playground! In this experimental project, art appears on your doorstep.
If you’d like to see this project come to life, please vote for Culture Within Newham as one of the People Powered Places projects for Green Street before 30 November 2025!
Why Green Street?
Green Street has no cinemas, theatres, museums, or concert halls, and for other art venues our consultations tell us that especially South Asian, Black, and young residents often don't feel welcome or confident accessing these spaces.
How will it work?
This project will use an open call for locations to establish a network of non-cultural places (like supermarkets, cricket grounds, petrol stations, and hairdressers) who are up for hosting creative performances or artworks. Once locations have been chosen, Culture Within Newham will then link artists and performers of different arts disciplines to these spaces. Activities will be shaped in collaboration with the places hosting them and their users, which we do through co-creation processes that we specialise in at Culture Within Newham.
The collaborations between artists and local spaces will help locally trusted places to develop into art spaces that can empower residents to express themselves and be heard, building new, safer and more inclusive environments.
How do I vote?
Anyone who lives, works, volunteers or studies in Newham can take part in the Big Vote.
Online voting is open to residents who are 13 years old and over. Younger children who would like to vote and can have a good understanding of the projects can do so in person at the events, in libraries or at outreach voting sessions, with adult supervision.
Everyone has a minimum of 5 votes and a maximum of 10 votes that they can use to vote for their favourite projects in their Community Neighbourhood
You can either vote online or in person, but you can only vote once.
You must be registered on Newham CoCreate to vote online.
To help filter through the different projects, you can search the categories on the right hand side of the page.
Learn more about The Big Vote and ‘Art in Unexpected Places’ on the Newham CoCreate website.