In the first video entry to our 10 Year Blog, the Hip-Hop Shakespeare company present a decidedly East End take on A History of Verse.

Coming out of a series of Hip-Hop projects the company has run at City Gateway's Limehouse Youth Centre, the video is an example of a bold new way of getting young people engaged with the history and culture around them. Previous workshops have included one session in which Shakesperean actor Sir Ian McKellen spat lyrics against Ms Dynamite and Akala.

1st May 2009, John Hill, The Wharf

Former DJ Josh Silverman is pushing for a fresh start at Reebok Gym after enduring tragedy and injury in the last few years.

The 21-year-old became a fitness coach at the Canada Square gym last month through an apprenticeship with Limehouse charity City Gateway.

23 April 2009, Lorraine Connolly, Community Newswire

9th April 2009, Lorraine Connolly, Community Newswire

In the first external entry to our 10 year Blog Vic Grimes, Director for Apprenticeships at the LSC, weighs up the real benefits apprenticeships have to offer, with a little help from Sir Alan Sugar.

With The Apprentice TV show well underway again, it seems like a good opportunity to look at the real life apprenticeships on offer.

12 April 2009, East London Advertiser

TEENAGERS will be rapping the works of Shakespeare this week following Hollywood star Sir Ian McKellen's visit earlier this year.

With the arrival of the Easter holidays the Hip-Hop Shakespeare master class, which launched with Sir Ian McKellen and MOBO award-winner Akala earlier this year, is coming back to City Gateway’s youth centre in the East End.

Engage is a short course aimed at giving young people the skills and experience they need in a relaxed and enjoyable environment - accredited qualifications at Entry Level and Level 1 (with a focus on Sport or IT) alongside sessions on job skills, personal development, numeracy and literacy.

This Thursday a new Engage: IT started with a bang with 18 young people signed up to the programme. Following a morning induction the team took the group bowling to help bowl down a few of the barriers between them all.

East London Advertiser, March 2009

CHARITY workers helping school-leavers in London’s East End who don’t have skills or jobs to go to have signed up deals with City firms to take on apprentices.

City Gateway, a charity which celebrates its 10th anniversary, has managed to reduce the numbers of jobless school-leavers in the deprived Tower Hamlets district from 15 out of every hundred to under seven in its first decade.

As part of our 10 Year Blog we'll be publishing case studies of those who've come through our projects in the past 10 years - written by them and telling their stories in their own words.

Here Josh Silverman, who graduated from our apprenticeship course, talks about the journey from the streets of Tower Hamlets to the Reebok Gym at Canary Wharf where he now works: