This is after-the-event fundraising, but please bear with us while we tell our story... 
We're the Strategy Department at the Diamond Trading Company (DTC) - the sales and marketing arm of the De Beers Group. Over the course of this year the DTC has challenged each of its departments to live one of our core values: "Show We Care". Being strategy geeks we wanted to do something a little different to the usual tombola or cake sale.
Our goal was to work with inner city kids to expose them to a very different experience that would excite their curiousity and creativity ... something akin to diamond discovery and mining. But since there are no active mines in London (to our knowledge), we settled on an archaeological day out.
Through the excellent services of an organisation called Three Hands (bringing business, charities and communities together - check them out at www.threehands.co.uk) we came across a FANTASTIC place called the Pumphouse.
The Pumphouse is a real gem of a heritage centre/museum. Have a look at its website: www.thepumphouse.org.uk. Nestled behind the fancy new waterfront houses of Rotherhithe, it is a community based museum that celebrates the heritage of the London's great docklands from the times of King Cnut to the donner and blitzen of WWII. Many if not most of the artefacts in the museum have been retrieved from the mudbanks of the river at low tide.
Eueeegh!! Just the sort of thing kids love. So, with the help of the Pumphouse Museum's hugely enterprising director, Caroline Marais, we spend a day out with the Year 5 class from Peter Hills C of E school ... on Friday 29th September, a spring tide day when the foreshore was nice and exposed in all its gloopy glory.
The challenge was to find objects that could be used to construct fantastical insects and other creepy things for display in the museum's Mini Beastie Garden (a sort of apiary-cum-froggery were kids learn about the things that go chirrup in the night).
And find things we did: old pipestems by the gazillion, rusted medieval bucket handles, sand-smoothed glass shards in every colour, bent nails and tacks, old rubber gloves, bits of computers and mobile phones and other unmentionables. With our muddy loot the 30 kids and our team of 6 went back to the pumphouse where we spent the rest of the day constructing weird and wonderful - and some quite pretty - insects and beasties out of the found things. These are now proudly on display at the museum.
We LOVED Pumphouse and so did our young friends from Peter Hills. It's the sort of community treasure that will only survive and prosper through charitable support. We undertook to help fund the construction of a Saxon hut - which was unveiled in October, but we think we can do more than that to ensure that more of London's youngsters have a chance to learn about their heritage in this safe and fun-filled environment.
So, in the run-up to Christmas please join us - Andrew, Andy, Frances, Howard, Jon, Mark, Raj and Vikram - in giving the Pumphouse a bit of a boost! Go on, don't be a stick-in-the-mud. Dig deep, as we archaeologists are wont to say. Many thanks!! 
