Hello welcome. My name is Hannah and today I want to take you through a couple fo examples of how our surrogates collection has helped us recreate heritage in times of great loss.
Just for those who do not know our surrogate collection is a collection of metadata that describes a material object or site and its context. The data in the surrogate collection is groups of information like, photographs, measurements, scans of maps, descriptions, and even oral history recordings. Our initial motivation to collect this information was because certain items we were interested in would come up for auction and in some cases we would be unable to acquire it and it would end up in a private collection. The thought was that if we had enough surrogate information and this information was store a safe and secure location we might be able to recreate certain objects if we needed to. The later also started to include items that were being treated by decay or mould or we simply could no longer look after properly because of budget cuts. After storm Humboldt which significantly damage the collection of a property in the south and the lost of cliff house a year later the institute decided to up the surrogate collection policy by getting sites to actively think about which collection items might be at risk and then even more ambitious act of creating surrogates for whole sites in some cases. This also led to an increase in oral histories being recorded as part of the surrogate scheme.
Moving on to our examples…
My first example is this bench which is a replica of a bench that was burnt during a fire caused by a severe drought we had a couple of years ago. The file on this bench in the surrogate collection had a couple of photographs but most importantly it had an oral history and some literature from the person who made the bench because they used particular techniques that are not very common knowledge.
The second development is one of our more recent project, which comes from the surrogate file on Seaton Sluice. The village no longer exists because after significant storms throughout the late 2020s it was deemed a unsafe space to live. At the time we collected maps, oral histories and photographs.
For the anniversary of the final resident leaving the village we commissioned a group of artists to create an audio visual experience to give an impression of Seaton Sluice before we lost it. We sifted through the surrogate data, the maps, photographs and recordings, and did a public call out for anyone who might have any material linked to the village, which led us to record new oral histories.
From this material two visual artists and sound artist created this beautiful map of Seaton Sluice which visually showed the different eras of the village and then on the map you had links to different audio clips. These audio varied between soundscapes, music and oral histories often mixing them together. In addition because we had so much archival material we also a creative writing student make a collection of short stories about Seaton Sluice, this was an extra thing visitors could buy. This project only week live a week ago so we have not yet had time to gather or evaluate feedback.
My last example it probably our most successful application of the surrogate collection, our local history storytellers. This does what it says on the tin. Storytellers go round visiting pubs, village halls and schools etc. telling stories of the local history. These stories are specifically about things in our surrogate collections because these are the things people do not have access to via museums or archives. We found that the surrogate collection is not used a lot by the public, so we wanted to do develop something that is a little more accessible and ended up with the storytellers. They have been great success. We are in our second year now and we have ten different storytelling programmes around the country and we are currently looking to add two new locations. People have said about the storytellers that they find it very engaging way to tell history and many have also commented on the pleasantness of the evenings and find them very relaxing. The schools similarly enjoy the storytellers. One of my favourite quotes came from Thomas, at St Mary’s Primary School saying, “I was going to go dressed up as Harry Potter for Book Day but now I am definitely going to go as Johnny the stable boy.”
So these are just three examples of what we are currently doing with our surrogate collection but we have many more in the pipeline and hope that we are able to do more as people become more aware of the collection and its potentail.