Re-Create The Streets: When a Community Brings Its Past Back to Life
A very special community heritage project that began with an old map, a lot of questions and a community full of memories is coming to Bolsover this September and October.
Re-Create The Streets began in December 2024 when local historian and Newton resident Tony Mellors started exploring a 1939 Ordnance Survey map alongside historical records of the people who lived in Newton. What started as a search to understand how the village once looked quickly grew legs and then tentacles.
Working alongside a resident-led group, the project became a heritage hunter-gathering exercise. Local people brought photographs out of drawers, shared memories, remembered shops and businesses, talked about neighbours and characters, and helped piece together a picture of Newton’s Main Street during the 1940s, 50s and 60s. But this was never intended to be just a collection of old photographs.
The community’s memories were transformed into a creative recreation of the street, including a large-scale watercolour by artist Pippa Huley-Gibbs, 3D models of historic shops, trades and watering holes made by local makers, oral histories recorded with local residents and miniature “peg people” created by Greater Creative’s young leaders with artist Meg Bonser.
The models house the stories of the street, with visitors able to listen to real voices recalling the people and places they remember. And the project has continued to live and grow beyond its original showcase. It has already travelled to Newton Primary School, where children, parents, teachers and the wider community explored the exhibition and listened to the stories of their local past.
Now it is travelling again.. .
A condensed version of Re-Create The Streets will be on display at the Engagement Hub in Bolsover town centre throughout September and October 2026. For those who know Newton, it will be a chance to recognise familiar names, places and memories. For those who don’t, it is an invitation to discover what happens when a community looks closely at its own history and realises just how much of it is still alive in the people around us.
Because sometimes heritage is a grand building. Sometimes it is an official record. And sometimes it is simply a story someone has been waiting to tell. And sometimes, when you put all those memories together, you can recreate a whole street.
Cotton Street, Bolsover, S44 6HA
Next to the Post office.
Open Tuesdays and Thursdays 10am till 2pm through September and October 202
Re-Create The Streets is part of Greater Creative’s wider Home Truths Blackwell Parish history project. It is funded by The National Lottery Heritage Fund, with thanks to National Lottery players, and facilitated and supported by Platform Thirty1.
