It’s International Women’s Day this Friday the 8th March, and we’re celebrating with the Women of Camden, past and present, to raise money for the Fawcett Society - the UK’s leading charity for gender equality and equal rights for women.
We’ve teamed up with Camden Town Football Club, our local women’s amateur team who play in Regents Park, to create a new kit for them featuring four inspirational women of Camden who reflect the creativity, diversity and inclusivity that has had people flocking from all over the world to Camden for generations.
The football kit features authors Sylvia Plath and Buchi Emecheta OBE, modernist sculptor Dame Barbara Hepworth, and suffragist leader Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett GBE, who all found inspiration in Camden during their lifetime.
Illustrated by our seasonal design collaborator for 2019, Bodil Jane, who’s known for her detailed, colourful windows into the worlds of women everywhere, this kit will be the first to kick off her design collaboration with us for the year, so stay tuned - you’ll see her work rolling out across our beers, branding and events as we go through the seasons.
Want to get your hands on one?
OUT NOW: You’ll have the chance to get one of these limited edition shirts yourself from our Camden Brewery Bar, with 100% of the proceeds going to the Fawcett Society.
From 4th - 10th March we donated all our beer profits to the charity, Thanks to everyone who came to enjoy a beer with us and raise money for a great cause.
You can find our bar under the railway arches of Kentish Town West overground station, open 1-11pm on Friday and 1-10pm every other day, with Wood Fired Wonders serving up their pizzas from Thursday to Sunday to keep you going. The shirts will be available on a first come basis from the bar, so stay tuned for the launch date.
Read all about the 4 women we’ve chosen to feature on the shirt and their links to Camden, illustrated by Bodil Jane.
SYLVIA PLATH
Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist and short-story writer, born in Boston in 1932. Plath met British poet Ted Hughes at Cambridge University, and they married at Church of St George the Martyr in Camden in 1956. After a few years teaching in the US, Plath and Hughes settled in Camden at 3 Chalcot Square, Primrose Hill, where Plath published her first collection of poetry The Colossus. Plath and her children later returned to live in Camden in 1962.
DAME BARBARA HEPWORTH DBE
Dame Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth was a British sculptor, and a leading figure in the international art scene throughout a career which spanned five decades. Born in Wakefield, Yorkshire in 1903, Hepworth first moved to London in the early 1920s to enrol in the Royal College of Art, and lived and worked in Mall Studios, tucked away between Gospel Oak and Belsize Park during 1927. Her work High Tide is regarded as an important object, which speaks to her time spent in Camden, and in particular to her experience in the male-dominated society which largely excluded women from the professional artistic field.
BUCHI EMECHETA OBE
Florence Onyebuchi “Buchi” Emecheta was a Nigerian-born British novelist. Born in Lagos, Emecheta moved to London in 1962. A prolific writer, Emecheta penned 15 novels during her career, the first of which, entitled In the Ditch, was set in the Queen’s Crescent area of Camden. As well as providing inspiration for that novel’s gritty and determined female protagonist, Emecheta’s children attended school in Camden, and she herself worked at the Chalk Farm Library during her early years in London.
DAME MILLICENT GARRETT FAWCETT
Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett was a British intellectual, political leader, activist and writer. The feminist icon is primarily known as a leading figure in the suffragist movement. Born in Suffolk in 1847, Fawcett first moved to London at the age of 12 to attend school in Blackheath. In 1867, Millicent married Liberal MP Henry Fawcett, and the two published a number of political essays together. When he passed in 1884, Millicent moved in with her sister, at 2 Gower Street, Bloomsbury, Camden and during the 45 years she lived there, Fawcett continued to campaign tirelessly on women’s rights, with British women finally being granted universal suffrage on the same terms as men a year before her death. Her work has continued ever since, with The London Society for Women’s Suffrage renamed as The Fawcett Society in her honour in 1953, which is the chosen charity partner for our Women Of Camden project.
