(This project is match funded by Heritage lottery fund)
We’re really enjoying working on our first Heritage Lottery match funded project!
Voices of Blackwell Parish is all about preserving our local heritage. It’s predominately an oral history project, where residents get interviewed and share their tales of being in the parish. This project idea was born through the pilot phase of Creative Civic Change.
Here, we and external community workers that we contracted consulted with the community to find out what mattered to them. One of the key findings in this consultation was that residents who had lived here through the ex-industrial heydays felt that all of the local history was invisible and would be lost. The pit wheels in the parish were the only reminders (as well as the falling down social clubs). We wanted to do something positive to preserve the stories we have so applied to the heritage lottery fund to do an oral history project.
Greater Creative Project Facilitator: "It’s really easy sometimes to undervalue the very nature of just how heritage based our projects actually are. Because they’re about people and the creative aspects the content piece on which inspires a lot of this is often not pointed at that much. A big strand of the ‘Roots to Routes’ work we’re doing at Greater Creative is to champion our people and place, celebrating and preserving hyperlocal stories and voices is super important to us. This is the first time that Platform Thirty1 has been brave enough to apply specifically to a heritage fund and it’s given us the support and kit to do this".
Andrew Dobb, a local podcast host has been delivering some development workshops for us to support the working party to learn how to interview and use the recording kit. Here are some of the working party members in action!
We’re ready to hear your tales Blackwell Parish! Get in touch with us to have a chin wag!
