At The Coal Face Of Realising Our History Is Being Lost
For four years the Greater Creative collective worked on the Creative Civic Change, which was an experimental funding programme supporting 15 communities across England to shape, lead and commission arts and creative interventions, to make positive social change where they lived and worked. You can learn more about our project here.
As part of this project, we discovered through lots of consultation and listening’s that celebrating and commemorating our heritage was one of the key findings of the project. With a small grant from HLF we managed to start to make some headway on this by doing an oral history project, here are some of the small animations we managed to create on our ‘Voices Of Blackwell Parish Project’.
Local historians
Greater Creative is made up of various community residents, two of which are local historians. Tony Mellors of Newton is a long time history enthusiast who found this passion talking to older residents and hearing about the lives in the villages of the parish.
He had little time for the history of Kings and Queens but was fascinated by the social history of the everyday family. Tony is also very interested to ensure that local history is not forgotten, but is instead passed to younger generations. Especially after Tony went into a local school to share some local history with KS2, during which session a young girl asked politely “what is coal?”, his interest deepened. The question came as quite a surprise initially in a community built on coal mining, but then why would a young girl of today know anything about coal? The mines are gone, the mineral railway lines are trails and the black pit tip sites are green country parks!
This underlined the lack of visible and celebrated history available to us and became one of the drivers for us to face some Home Truths, that if we don’t preserve our past, it will get lost!
Hearing what history people want to celebrate and preserve is really important in this project so we have taken to stalls and events in the churches, schools and community centres over the last year to invite people to join us, hear what matters to them, consult playfully and gain information from them to help shape the projects direction.
