We were delighted to be the first event in this year’s Wandsworth Heritage Festival. Our poetry workshop In and Out of Education was held at Battersea Library on Saturday 20 May 2023, and we had some lovely, studious and inspiring attendees. We’d sourced some materials from the Wandsworth Heritage Service to use as prompts for writing exercises, which included fabulous photographs from Mayfield School – an all-girl’s school in the Putney area. We asked our students to imagine themselves as one of the students in a photo for one exercise, and as one of the teachers for another. Then we bent our heads down and wrote.

One of our students had English as a second language, and stalled at getting started, so we encouraged her to write in her own language, Spanish. Most of the attendees had no creative writing or poetry experience, so it was wonderful to help them…