“I’m interested in history because it informs the present and can help guide how we respond to the future. I’m not interested in history for history’s sake, or heritage for heritage’s sake. What interests me are the stories they tell us about who we are and how we got here.”
I was invited to talk with Open Road recently for their ‘We’ve been talking to…’ blog series, and had a great chat with Dr Lucy Stroud about who I am (ain’t that a difficult one…), what I do, what stories I think are important to preserve from the past, and what I hope for the future.
Open Road are a great organisation, pulling together stories, places, and communities.
You can find out more about Open Road and read the interview here.
Aberdeen’s Castlegate – Image and Copyright Steve Smith
Our relationships with place are nearly always expressed through story, and this is what fascinates me most about what it is that makes a place, a place – the unique community stories that come out of any given location.
For the last 9 months I’ve been working on a pilot project commissioned by Aberdeen City Council through Historic Env. Scotland’s Heritage and Place Programme. The project aims to celebrate, record, and reveal the historic and contemporary stories that make up the Castlegate’s unique sense of place in the east end of Aberdeen city centre, and to capture the social history of the area at a time when the city is on the cusp of change.
I ran a series of community-based workshops exploring local heritage and relationships with place, and, working alongside the project photographer, conducted audio-recorded interviews to capture a sample of individual experiences relating to the Castlegate and its heritage.
We opened an exhibition at Aberdeen Arts Centre to showcase some of the photography for those who feature in the project, and we worked with artist and filmmaker Callum Kellie and a digital surveying and software company to launch an interactive online platform and digital map to house some of the material gathered, which you can explore at the link below.
We’ve only scratched the surface, but we hope we’ll have opportunity to build on the work done so far to capture a sense of a city that is both informed by its past and working hard to rewrite its future.
