CORNWALL'S UNTOLD STORIES
BLACK PRESENCE & LEGACY
BHM 2025

Cornwall's Untold Stories:

Black Presence and Legacy

 

 This illuminating talk (recorded 30th October 2025) invites audiences to rediscover Cornwall’s connections to the wider world, from the histories of migration and maritime trade to the creative, political, and community contributions of Black individuals and families who have lived and thrived here for generations.This event is a community conversation - an opportunity to listen, learn, and reflect together on our past. By uncovering these hidden narratives, Helen and Chloe encourage a deeper understanding of Cornwall’s diverse heritage and inspire ongoing dialogue about identity, inclusion, and representation today.Everyone is warmly welcome to join this thought-provoking and inspiring evening as we celebrate the stories that have too often gone untold.

 

Get to know Helen

I am a poet of Sierra Leonean and Irish heritage who was born in London and who has lived in Cornwall for 25 years. I love poetry (reading, writing and listening to it being performed), theatre, researching black history, looking at objects related to black history, and swimming in the sea. My PhD/DPhil focused on slave narratives published in Britain during the C18th and was published as Romanticism and Slave Narratives (CUP, 2000). My first volume of poems, 1562 (2022) voices the fictional lives of 6 black women from 6 ports in C16th Britain. In 2022, my semi-autobiographical poetic play, Salve, was showcased at the Theatre Royal Plymouth; and in 2024, my play, Maeve and the 3,000 Black GIs, was showcased at the Phoenix Theatre Exeter by Beyond Face Theatre Company. I am currently completing a second collection of poems (and am looking for a publisher J) and a play about black British identity. I am a co-founder of CoDeCC, the Cornwall and Devon Creative Collective CIC (https://www.codecc.co.uk),and WORD KITCHEN (https://www.wordkitchen.org) and and have four children.

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Get to know Chloe

Chloe Phillips is entering the final stages of a PhD project focusing on Black histories of Cornwall, c1550-1900, funded through the University of Leicester's Future 100 scholarship programme. She started the PhD after fifteen years working in the heritage sector in Cornwall, mostly as an archive engagement and learning officer at Kresen Kernow, where she led a project to improve the archive collections relating to Black history. Chloe is working with Black Voices Cornwall and Museum X to explore ways to share this heritage more widely.We are proudly collaborating with Cornwall and Devon Creative Collective on this event.