Ed created and ran a series of drawings and painting workshops for Charter Bermondsey School from April to July 2026. The resulting 13 90cm x 60cm paintings celebrate the impact of education and educators in the streets around the new Charter school site in Keeton’s Road, and are meant for permanent display on the new Charter School site. 2026 marks the 150th anniversary of the 1876 Education Act which gave every child the right to education up tot he age of 10 years old. The 19thC builder’s merchant Thomas Keeton helped to fund the first school in the area, in what became known as Keeton’s Road and there have been several schools built on the site over the last 150 years. Keeton’s road school was tragically destroyed by bombs in 1940 with the loss of 40 people who were sheltering there. London’s first female Mayor Ada Salter, a political activist and environmentalist Ada Salter, and her husband, local doctor and politician Alfred Salter, sent their daughter Joyce to the school. Sadly Joyce died from scarlet fever shortly after joining the school. in 1971 the new school was named after Scott Lidgett, a Victorian Methodist minister who attempted to improve the lives and opportunities of working people via the Bermondsey settlement. Scott Lidgett School closed its doors when the area became depopulated after the docks were shut down, only to remerge as Southwark College, then Compass School and now the newly renovated Charter School building. Such a legacy of educational provision deserved an art project befitting the pupils and staff who left their mark here over these past 150 years.
Charter School Legacy Project journey
Meeting Joyce Trotman
Working with a group of 8 Year 7 & 8 pupils we began by sketching former Scott Lidgett teacher in the art room. Joyce Trotman. 98 years young, Joyce arrived in England from Guyana in the late 1960s and took up a teaching job at the largely white Scott Lidgett School, a move which made her one of the first black female teachers in Southwark. Throughout her career Joyce made a bit impact on the learning experience of these young white boys, and they made a big impact on her. Inspired by her love of literature, Dickens & Keats in particular, and her quaker beliefs, Joyce encouraged a love of words and language in her pupils.
The art group made sketches of Joyce from life, as research for the project and she became a point of connection for the group to the past stories of the school and the locality.
Sketching contemporary life in Charter School Bermondsey
The next stage of the project was to recreate moments from the curriculum. The pupils had discussed the basic curriculum requirements of 19thC London schools and through Joyce we had learnt how Bermondsey has changed in the second half of the last century. The social changes in the area had created changes within pupils’ learning experiences. It was time to celebrate contemporary school life. Pupils used props from different curriculum areas and sketched themselves in mocked-up classroom situations.
Composition creation
By week 4 the pupils were ready to enlarge, transpose and compose their sketches into narrative paintings before beginning to outline and block-in colours. Each subsequent weekly workshop session focused and reinforced colour-mixing and sensitive brush handling. Discussions reinforced concepts of painting with light to build three dimensional form, creating texture and pattern use.
The final stages
During the last few sessions Year 7 & 8’s paintings are nearing completion. Colours are layered, details added, tones are heightened and the pupils’ narratives are emerging, before they are varnished. Most importantly for a painting about a school – a social collective – the paintings have a sense of group identity. Pupils have watched each others’ work grow and solidify from lines, shapes and tones into real emotionally engaging paintings that describe a collective endeavour; the desire to learn from, and about, ourselves in this moment and our place in our ever changing community.
Originally it had been intended that the pupils would explore more of the social changes in the history of Bermondsey through two additional monochromatic paintings . Group discussions revolved throughout the project about the working people of the docks, the fight for workers’ rights, migration, the slave trade, and the devastation that brought destruction from the skies at the hands of the Luftwaffe in World War II which resulted in so much loss of life, even in the old school that stood on the same foundations as modern day Charter Bermondsey. The impact of educators and local activists from Thomas Keeton to Scott Lidgett and Ada and Alfred Salter was considered and the group talked about the death of their child Joyce, a pupil at the school that once stood here, and how much safer pupils are now thanks to modern medicine and the National Health Service. Conversations looped back to the River Thames, early migration and trading and Norse the origins of Bermondsey’s name, the medieval abbey and the palace of king Edward III now a ruin that lies by the river, where he used to hunt with his falcons and dogs.
The project ran out of time and this additional work could not be completed in time by the art group so Ed painted two monochrome pieces to accompany the pupils’ work, with help from Matthew, one of the Year 7 pupils, to complete the series. This work will be installed in the school in September 2026.
Year 7 & 8 finish their Charter Bermondsey School heritage legacy paintings
Frida’s painting
Artwork made by Ed with help from Matthew Year 7
Bermondsey Part One
Artwork made by Ed
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Joyce Trotman, to all these amazing Year 7 & 8 pupils for working so hard on this project, and to Araxie De Placky the art teacher at Charter School Bermondsey for letting me invade her space. My thanks also to Charter Head Mr Huntley and Charter School pupils and staff for welcoming me into their school.
Ed Gray, August 2026