Tales from the Treasure Trove – creative writing with The Cuming Collection
June 6 2026, 11.00am – 1.00pm
Southwark Heritage Centre and Walworth Library, 145-147 Walworth Road London SE17 1RW

Objects are alive! They hold secrets of people and places, take you to other worlds, reveal histories and cultures, are containers for memories and emotions. And they can be a way into the imagination. I am leading a creative writing workshop inspired by objects from the Cuming Collection. I will guide participants with playful and flowing creative prompts and tasks to explore the collection at Walworth Road Library. Judy Aitken, the Curator of the Cuming Collection, will talk to us about the collection and bring some rare treasures from the storeroom for participants to look at closely and even touch!

Objects are powerful! They help us ask who made them, how and why. A tiny object can tell us about climate and landscape, migration and social structures. I have been working with objects in galleries and museums for many years, creating stories that bring objects to life through narrative performance. I see my role as guide to the imagination, taking the audience inside an object to reveal hidden worlds of culture, history and myth. My aim is to help the audience see through the object – to the imagination of the people who created it.

I have been working with The British Museum for many years. And in 2010 they commissioned me to write and perform six interlinked stories for their exhibition ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’. The stories were told in cliff-hanging instalments over a whole year. I time travelled across six objects, from the delicate carving on a mammoth tusk of two reindeer swimming dated to 13,000 BCE, to a throne of weapons made in 2002 from decommissioned weapons collected after the devastating civil war in Mozambique. Audiences returned to different galleries and objects over the year to hear the next instalment. Time passed from hunter-gatherer society to the modern world, the making of objects connecting us to our distant ancestors, who like us created objects to express who they were, to wonder about existence, transmit meanings and change things.

Objects are mysterious! Join Judy and I with The Cuming Collection to uncover hidden histories. We will get you looking at objects in detail, and guided by inspiring prompts you will create poems based on hand-written labels, find a memory inside a teacup, imagine the owner of a giant key, dream over a map! You will explore ways to combine fact and fiction, delve into social history and play with sheer invention. Tales from the Treasure Trove is based on real life objects but takes you into a world of imagination!
The workshop is free but you need to book here!