Two history projects involving young people have just been awarded £70,000 by the Heritage Lottery Fund, to seek out and preserve some of Bexley’s hidden history. LINDA PIPER finds out more.

THE contrasting projects, both involving local school children, will be setting out to discover different pieces of Bexley’s historical jigsaw.

Lower Belvedere is being rapidly transformed by £10.6m worth of regeneration projects.

Tideline- The Voice of Regeneration has been given £46,500 by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) to capture the memories of people living in Lower Belvedere and spark renewed interest in today’s Belvedere marshes.

Bexley Council’s arts manager Saskia Delman explained: “The marshes and their nature reserves are hidden gems, but when we talked to residents about the regeneration, many of them did not even know they were there.”

Writer Sarah Butler will join up to eight “heritage ambassadors” from the community, in unlocking the memories of communities who live down by the River Thames.

Run by Bexley Council’s arts service, the project will use the gathered information to create a series of texts which will be installed in the area.

One text will run along the wall of the Thames riverside walk.

Meanwhile pupils from Trinity School in Erith Road, Belvedere will become “marsh detectives”, finding out about the history of the marshes and their wildlife, to provide a youth guide to the marshes.

A new website will be created where all the stories will be posted and where a series of books written by the ambassadors and the Trinity pupils will be exhibited.

A series of workshops is also planned where local people will be invited to find names for four new water drainage dykes.

The project is expected to be completed by October this year and its material will also go into the archives at Bexley Local Studies and Archive department.

The second project is centred on the Second World War and will involve pupils from Erith’s Russian school SERLS (South East Russian Language Society) Friendship, which meets on Sundays in West Street.

This year will mark the 65th anniversary of the allied victory in Europe and it will also be 70 years since the bombs rained down on London in the Blitz, so time is rapidly running out to record people’s first-hand experiences.

The school has been given a grant of almost £24,000 from HLF’s Young Roots programme to talk to their grandparents and local people, about their experiences as children during the Second World War.

Teacher Galina Clark said: “The idea came from the children.

“Because many of them come from mixed backgrounds, they discovered their British grandparents had a very different childhood experience of the war from their eastern European grandparents.”

About 40 children will take part, either searching archive material, interviewing people, doing artwork for the project or uploading material onto the school’s website.

The children will get training in how to take oral histories from people, visit the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich to find out about Erith’s war history and the Imperial War Museum in London which has done a similar project.

There will also be a trip to Chelsea Football Club to find out about the match between the club and Moscow Dynamo in 1945.

All their work , which will take 18 months, will be collated into a touring exhibition and will also be kept in the borough archives.

Anyone interested in becoming a “heritage ambassador” can write to Sarah Butler, care of Belvedere Library in Woolwich Road, or email sarah.butler@bexley.gov.uk

Bexley children who would like to join in the SERLS Friendship project can drop into the oral history training session on February 17 at Erith library in Erith High Street between 10am and noon and speak to Mrs Clark.