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Big Mouth Tower Hamlets

Shaping oral health research priorities through community conversations

For too long, oral health research has focused narrowly on disease outcomes — ignoring the social, cultural, and emotional factors that define how people actually experience oral health. In 2024/25, Big Mouth Tower Hamlets set out to change this. The project did this by capturing the questions, ideas, and topics that people in Tower Hamlets wanted oral health research and teaching at the QMUL dental school to focus on to improve their oral health.

Big Mouth gathered people’s insights using a range of inclusive participatory creative methods such as body mapping and community Big Conversations. Throughout the project, the team engaged seldom-heard voices across the borough and worked with Social Action for Health and researchers in School of Geography.

You can read all about the project, including its key findings, in the Big Mouth Tower Hamlets book [PDF 11,829KB] created by Catherine McArdle Designs.

Isolde Godfrey from Woven Ink created our project mural capturing the insights and ideas from the Big Mouth Conversations.

This project was funded through a large grant from the Centre for Public Engagement.

Thank you to all of the participants who were involved in the project.

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