digital-works is an arts and education charity dedicated to social history and community voice. We specialise in high-quality media production — including documentary film, podcasts, and photography — with a focus on participation and co-creation.
Our Core Expertise:
Oral History: We are experts in capturing lived experiences, ensuring the voices of under-represented communities are recorded and shared widely.
Media Production: We translate those stories into compelling documentary films and podcasts designed for wide public engagement.
Training: Our experienced team provide skills training through highly regarded workshops in video production, audio recording, and oral history interview techniques.
Over the years we have completed many wonderful projects covering dozens of subjects, and had the pleasure of interviewing hundreds of incredible people. Subjects we have explored include various types of work in London, neighbourhoods, political campaigns, leisure, music and housing. In the process we have found ourselves in dusty workshops in Hatton Garden and Savile Row, trudging through mud, or sitting on boats on the River Thames, riding on Routemaster buses, taxi cabs and trains, in inspiring youth and community centres and in breweries and jazz clubs.
In the process we have worked with hundreds of volunteers, dozens of historians, academics and archivists.
More info here.
Railway workers at Kings Cross Station tell stories from their working lives from the age of steam to the super fast trains of today. Drivers, guards, cooks, firemen, station announcers and more talk about their work, the skills, the joys and pain and the camaraderie working at ‘the cross’.
More info here.
Recalling a time when the East End ports were the ‘larder of London’, the Thames Lightermen (and women), talk about their incredible skills navigating this busy river with barges laden with goods from all over the world. Includes evocative archive 8mm film footage of the working river.
More info here.
The Alexandra and Ainsworth Estate is a prime example of the idealism of 1960s Camden and of the ‘brutalist’ architecture that characterised it. Hear from architect Neave Brown and residents about the history of the construction of the estate and of people’s experiences living there.
More info here.
With the “Holiday with Pay Act” of 1938 began a whole new leisure industry as Londoners began taking vacations at holiday camps such as Butlins, Pontins and Warners as well as the trade union run camps. With gorgeous archive footage listen to stories of family holidays, romance and more!
More info here.
London is home to some of the most skilled session musicians in the world. Listen to their stories of working in recording studios, running from an advertising jingle in Soho at 8am to record a film score at 10am and then a jazz album in the afternoon and how technology has changed this work.
More info here.
We explore the lives of people living on boats on the River Thames which increased rapidly after the war. An assortment of people found themselves living on all sorts of boats, attracted by cheaper prices and a pioneering spirit, often in the face of floods and sinking!
More info here.