Walkley History update

Great night with the Walkley historians last night. Seventeen people gathered around tables in Walkley Community Centre with maps, documents and photos to decide who is going to research what from the lives of WW1 soldiers through the early years of Walkley Reform Club to post-war life, slum clearance and the Walkley Action Group campaign.

Then, we followed the historian session with the second of two oral history training workshops at the Centre. There are now 21 trained oral historians ready to hit the streets of Walkley to discover its remembered past! Some will begin recording family, friends and neghbours. We also have about 30 people who have been in touch asking to be recorded.

Today, we spent an hour with Veronica Hardstaff in Ruskin Park, identifying which demolished streets local school children will mark out across the park for the Walkley Festival’s Ruskin Park Fun Day on the 6th July. The even numbers of Harworth Steet are definitely on to do, including the club at the corner with Daniel Hill St.

Some of the stalls will be in people’s houses, hopefully the beer tent in a back garden and the stage in the club.

We will write potted biographies of families from as many demolished homes as we can, with names and occupations, display photos and produce a discovery trail for families.

Princes of Gwynedd

We are happy to announce inHeritage are working on the Princes of Gwynedd project.

We are writing website text for 30 sites in north Wales as well as pages on ten key figures in the history of the region during the Medieval period.

The aim is to encourage visitors to explore the sites, discover key features and connect different places to make itineraries.

We will be visiting as many of the sites as possible in late February before drafting texts during early March.

Walkley Ways, Walkley Wars Launch

 The Walkley Ways, Walkley Wars history project was launched with a bang at the Walkley Community Centre, Sheffield on Friday evening.


Almost 100 people packed out the Centre for two hours. It is great to see so much interest in Walkley’s history from such a wide range of ages and parts of the community. Bill introduced the project and two key players in the 1960s/70s slum clearance and improvements scheme gave talks - Geoff Green of the Walkley Action Campaign and Narendra Bajaria, a former planning officer with Sheffield City Council. There were exhibitions of the slum clearance plans, photographs of Walkley in the 1970s and of the memorial windows to the men of the Walkley Reform Club who died in the First World War.

There was a real buzz of excitement in the room, with almost half of the participants having lived in Walkley from before the 1960s, many either moving as their houses were demolished during slum clearance or still living in houses saved from demolition. The participants formed a cross-section of 21st century Walkley society, from teenagers to people in their 80s, and people born and bred in Walkley to more recent arrivals. Thirty-five people signed-up to take part in the research and exploration of Walkley's past over the next three years.

First World War memorial to F. Hartley of the Walkley Reform Club and Sheffield Pals.

 The project will:

1) Research the lives of Walkley people before they went to fight in World War 1 and preserve the memorials of fallen members of the Walkley Liberal Reform Club.

2) Explore the council plans to demolish Walkley in the 1960s and 70s.

3) Catalogue, research and make public the Walkley Action Group archive in the Walkley Commnunity Centre.

4) Record memories of Walkley life during the 1960s and 70s.

5) Find out what Fir St was like in 1908/09 when the Walkley Liberal Reform Club was proposed and built.

South Road, 1978

The project will train volunteers in local history and oral history who will participate in much of the exciting research.

A steering group comprising Rick Allen and Nicole Houghton (WCC), Bill Bevan, Rev Melanie FitzGerald, Veronica Hardstaff and Hugh Waterhouse will oversee the project on behalf of WCC.
We hope the project will lead to the establishment of a Walkley History Society, who will use the Community Centre as its base.

The project is funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and is being managed by inHeritage on behalf of the Walkley Community Centre.


You can view Bill’s introduction to the project, presented to the project launch as a video on YouTube.

http://youtu.be/SUoi6t_uDZQ

November Round-Up

November has been a busy month for inHeritage! We've barely had time to draw breath.

We have been appointed to the new Walkley Ways, Walkley Wars heritage project by Walkley Community Centre, providing project management, oral history mentoring, design and interpretation on a three year community heritage project.

The final self-guided trails for the Hunter Archaeological Society's  centenary have been produced as leaflets and audio tours.

We have been appointed to work on a project in Cottingham, East Yorkshire, to help develop a series of heritage workshops around the theme of the Mark Kirby Free School, which celebrates the 300th anniversary of Kirby's endowment this year. The workshops cover aspects of life in the village in the early 1700s, including childhood, costume, food and the landscape.

We have begun work on interpretation of the Grenoside Reading Room, Sheffield, to coincide with the refurbishment of the room as a community events and arts centre.

Tideswell Tales has been continuining apace with planning work beginning in earnest on the community performance. This will take material from the oral history work to create a series of free-flowing promenade performances throughout the village in Wakes Week next year.

The report writing phase of the Castleton and Hope Lives of the Medieval Common People project is now underway, especially for the documentary research and archaeology test pits.

AHI Conference 2012

The Association for Heritage Interpretation 2012 annual conference (http://www.ahi.org.uk) focused on quality and the visitor experience, putting heritage interpretation at the heart of designing the experience visitors have of a property.

The presentations and visits have highlighted the necessity of considering the visitor experience from the outset of interpretive planning. It is not rocket science, however a number of speakers have shown the efforts they have made to change organisational thinking and avoid the scenario of staff simply deciding what they will do to visitors without finding out what visitors desire. Examples ranging from the National Trust and Historic Royal Palaces to interpretation for visually impaired people and pre-schoolers demonstrated why interpreters and property managers should consider how visitors do and should experience a place to offer a more satisfying and accessible visit. The benefits include an enhanced sense of place leading  to higher values of a property and its heritage, as well as financial return from longer and repeat visits. Numerous speakers showed the link between heritage interpretation and tourism development, and the need for thorough planning and evaluation. To me, it seems essential that interpretation is closely linked with tourism assessment of a property.

I was particularly interested in properties which encourage visitor participation in their engagement with the place, partly building on the new ways people interact with their world through social media and people's resulting expectations of interacting with 'bricks and mortar'. The concept of the participatory 'museum' can be applied to other types of venue, and is an essential approach to communicate with audiences who expect to interact actively with their world, as well as being a way to develop a sense of ownership of a property for those audiences.

I gave a presentation about providing interpretation to pre-school children and their families in such a way that this audience can enjoy a visit to countryside and historic house properties. Pre-school children can engage with and remember carefully chosen key messages, while their parents or guardians can also engage with the property rather than miss out because of needs of their children take them away from concentrating on the property's heritage stories. Appropriate interpretation can be integrated into the needs of the pre-school family through play, art, crafts, story telling and even snack time.

Conference visits were made to Blists Hill Victorian Town, Much Wenlock Museum and RAF Cosford. All three venues offer different visitor experiences which engage people with specific heritage themes. Blist Hill is a reconstructed 1900 industrial town populated with costumed interpreters, Much Wenlock interprets the local cultural and natural heritage witha focus on the birth of the modern Olympic movement, while Cosford has opened a huge Cold War museum which goes someway beyond just being about big planes. I would take the Blist Hill property managers to task about their claims for 'authenticity' as if they are creating something which is an unsullied real 1900 experience rather than. 21st Century tourism representation.

Overall, the conference has offered much to inspire interpreters to place an understanding of visitors central to developing interpretation projects.

Calver Weir Podcast

The first podcast from the Calver Weir oral history project is now online. It features Ray Fowler talking about his experiences, projects and successes as Sales Director at Sissons, who made stainless steel products at Calver Mill during the second half of the 20th Century. Some were shipped to the Falklands. The interview was recorded by the oral history volunteers and edited by inHeritage.

http://www.calverweir.org.uk/page1/page1.php

Henge Diggers Exhibition

Bill Henge Diggers exhibition opens in Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum on the 8th September.

You can find out more on Bill Bevan Photography.

Details of the exhibition opening times on are the museum website.

The exhibition is funded by the Arts Council with support from Manchester Museum and Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum.