Mr Matthew Morrison

Recent PCE activities include:

September 2023: The Soho Poly participated in Open House, inviting the public to visit the venue, view its archive, and contribute to discussions about its future.

June 2023: The Soho Poly Summer Festival invited Badge Café to provide craft workshops for Westminster LGBTQ+ Forum and Café Queero, which supports domestic abuse survivors. We ran an educational workshop for Lister School (‘hugely moving… a real honour and treat’ – teacher feedback) and co-produced, with Unfinished Histories, a reading of Jackie Kay’s groundbreaking 1986 play ‘Chiaroscuro’ about Black Lesbian experience. The festival’s flagship ‘Disrupt Your Everyday: Local Business Challenge’ engaged the National Academy for Social Prescribing, Kids Charity and Fun Palaces in a practice-as-research investigation into community arts provision. £20,000 in grants from QHT and Westminster City Council allowed us to involve 30 students in design and delivery.

March 2023: To celebrate completion of our National Lottery Heritage Fund project, we invited the Assistant Director of the National Theatre to the Regent Street Cinema to discuss institutional racism. The Lottery project generated 12 oral histories with former Soho Poly practitioners including Hanif Kureishi, Simon Callow and Harriet Walter and a free-to-download Education Pack on Inclusive Theatre aimed at Key Stage 4 (both available here).

January 2023: Digitally excluded members of charity Open Age were invited to take part in a correspondence memoir writing course. This developed out of earlier student-delivered workshops, designed under the mentorship of the Ruppin Literary Agency and the British Library Oral History Society. (‘Thank God for the Soho Poly’ – participant feedback.)

Other work:

In 2017, I received £1,500 from the British Academy/AHRC-sponsored Being Human Festival for inclusion in their annual celebration of Humanities-led public engagement. My contribution was identified as an example of best practice and Guy Osborn and I were subsequently successful in three further bids. For our most recent – ‘Soho After Covid’ (2021) – we commissioned poetic responses to an earlier report we had produced (with funds from the LAS Arts, Communication and Culture research community) into the impact of Covid on central London venues. The poems were displayed in local shop windows, to which Festival attendees were led in one of the West End’s first post-Covid cultural events.