The Pier Trust was started in 1997 by Anne Beech, Alex Sainsbury and Juliet Steyn, soon joined by Andrew Brighton. In 1998, Ingrid Swenson MBE was appointed Director who led the organisation until 2021. The Pier Trust took up affordable office space in the old Shoreditch Town Hall from where they produced public projects in various locations. The name Peer was soon implemented under Swenson, establishing Peer as a critically acclaimed arts organisation that offered artists support at key moments in their practice.
In 2002, Peer secured local authority premises in the form of a shop unit in Arden Estate on Hoxton Street, located next to the post office and opposite Hackney Community College, where it remains to this day.
In 2015, Swenson led the organisation through an ambitious capital redevelopment project that was completed by Trevor Horne Architects. The project transformed Peer’s shopfront to include a 10-metre-wide glass façade to bring its work onto the street and implemented Khadija’s Garden, a public green space named in memory of artist and previous Peer employee, Khadija Mohammadou Saye, also known as Ya-Haddy Sisi Saye, who was tragically killed in the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017.
Through this work, Peer has come to be an internationally acclaimed and respected arts charity with a critical local focus, and is widely known for its experimental and risk taking programme.
A significant strand of this history is rooted in a body of exhibitions by artists at significant stages of their practice and several artist commissioned public realm projects in Shoreditch and Hackney. The most recent of which is situated on Hoxton Street and was the culmination of a collaboration between the artist Mohammed Z. Rahman and Peer’s 2025 cohort of Peer Ambassadors, a group of local young people aged 17–25. The Ambassador Programme was launched in 2017 and remains at the core of Peer’s local work to this day.
In 2022, Ellen Greig was appointed the position of Director at Peer. She brought to Peer a renewed focus on collaborating with artists to produce new commissions, building partnerships with Peer’s local, national and international communities and supporting local young people in their professional and creative development.
While continuing to uphold its commitment to being in dialogue with its local context, Peer’s recent programme invites artists and audiences to build relationships between artistic making, cultural production and intellectual and political thought. Examining themes including the construction of place, sovereignty and community, Peer’s recent and forthcoming programme includes new commissions by artists Okiki Akinfe, Dala Nasser and Ceidra Moon Murphy, alongside this year’s iteration of the Peer Ambassadors programme in collaboration with Shoreditch Library.
Visit our archive for more information on our past projects.
