We are building on our successful creative community engagement through the new Tommy Flowers Foundation, set up with support from Power To Change, working across both northeast England, which recognised Tommy’s achievements through an honorary doctorate from Newcastle University and in east London, where he grew up. Tommy’s work is a testament to how personal drive and innovation can change the world, a great example to those from similar working-class backgrounds as him.
The foundation grew out of The Tommy Flowers community pub set up in April 2018 on Aberfeldy Street, just next to where Tommy was born and raised. Described by the Plunkett Foundation at the House of Lords in October 2019 as “A new model of creative community engagement”, the pub was handed over to local residents to run in 2021, when the foundation was established in the next-door unit, a long-empty former post office. The podcast below was recorded by Lucia Scazzocchio of Social Broadcasts at the opening of the pub and features interviews with Tommy’s son Ken Flowers, Dr Stephen Fleming from The National Museum of Computing and Bletchley Park veterans Betty O’Connell and Irene Dixon, who operated Colossus as teenage Wrens in 1944-5.
Aims & objectives
The incorporation of the foundation into a Charitable Community Benefit Society (CCBS) with a strong group of trustees is helping our organisation to reach wider demographics. The son of an East End bricklayer, Tommy was awarded his honorary doctorate in…
Our aims and objectives
Community membership
Using support from The Mayor’s Cultural Team at City Hall as a Make London grant and match-funding from Tower Hamlets Innovation Fund, we have already delivered creative learning opportunities, including six glassblowing sessions to 185 local people, waste cardboard upcycling workshops to 40…
About community membership
