Westminster’s Life Under Lockdown

Volunteering, jobs & education

One of our regular volunteers is a keen photographer, so he really enjoyed the opportunity to help us chronicle the project's activities. A young man with SEN who took part is a very skilled cartoonist and will begin volunteering with us as an artist in residence later in 2022. Several of the young people went on to attend some of our holiday workshops at the museum.

Arts, culture & heritage

The project allowed us to bring our speciality - cartoon and comic-strip art - to our new neighbours and involve them in our work. All of the groups involved expressed an interest in doing further workshops and activities in 2022, and hopefully as Covid concerns recede we'll be welcoming them along with the many other groups that have since enquired about taking part when we restart Life Under Lockdown workshops. Our aim is to then see what other interests they have that we can address using a similar model. The original artwork, as well as copies of the comic, will go into The Cartoon Museum's archive as first-hand accounts of what will be remembered as a testing time in our history.

Activity, health and leisure

By teaching young people how to write and draw their own cartoons and comic-strips we got them thinking creatively, humorously, and occasionally poignantly about their own lives. The skills they gained will give them a new hobby for their own leisure time if they so choose, and a few have already taken part in our subsequent school-holiday workshops.