#hackneychildrenschoir

In the hall at St Paul’s, West Hackney, pews have been shifted, cakes and squash are ready in the kitchen, and an accompanist is playing the piano. School has finished and around 30 children are singing Faure, Maria, Mater Gratiae, reading music from sheets, with just a few parents looking on. 

Hackney Children’s Choir draws children from eight primary schools, in a borough with one of the highest child poverty rates in the country. The children sing mainly sacred music, tackling works from hymns to Mass settings and church anthems by a range of composers from Britten to Handel, Mendelssohn and John Rutter. Many of the young singers rarely leave the borough and the choir has opened up a new world for them – of visits to King’s College, Cambridge, St Paul’s Cathedral, the Royal Albert Hall and even residential choral singing courses – after fundraising by the church - over the Easter and summer holidays held in public schools such as Wellington and Eton. 

One of the boys, nine-year-old Christian, the youngest of a family of five children, discovered a passion for playing the piano through attending choir rehearsals. The church now lends him the keys to the church hall where he can practise and he has recently taken a grade exam. His mother, Christine Kakai, 54, speaks of the additional gains of singing in the choir. “It is not only the music, it is the discipline, learning to work with others, and taking instructions, sometimes learning to share just through sharing music.”  

The choir is just one project run by Tom Daggett, who leads music outreach work at St Paul’s Cathedral.  From Burnley in Lancashire, and a former organ scholar at Lincoln College, Oxford, he learned to play the organ as a schoolboy at Blackburn Cathedral, where he developed his love of church music. As director of music at St George-in-the-East in Tower Hamlets, he has founded a second children’s choir at St Paul’s Church of England School in Whitechapel. Both the Hackney and Tower Hamlets choirs draw children from a range of backgrounds and teach the children to read music. The work of the choirs is part of the ministry of the Church of England, he says, and its traditional role in community building. “The church has always had a role in building communities and I think that is what choirs do very well.” 

- Martha Linden, Archbishops’ Council Senior Media Officer

Tom Daggett is the OBE Outreach Fellow at St Paul’s Cathedral. His work also includes wider music education in primary and secondary schools in London through partnering with school choirs who then sing in the Cathedral, and running  a ‘digital organ’ project allowing children to experience playing the organ in schools and learn music appreciation improvisation. The Hackney Children’s Choir is run in partnership with St Paul’s West Hackney, which is in the Diocese of London.