London is an amazing place to work but it’s always exciting when we get the opportunity to visit other places around the UK. I hadn’t been to Leeds since my friend got married there so it was lovely to visit again and travel out to the suburbs. Middleton Park is the sort of park that Londoners dream of, basically they seem to have fenced off a forest to protect it from the city. We were there to visit the Young Archaeologists’ Club and William, one of the members who had won Young Archaeologist of the Year.
Miggy Park, as locals call it, has received several rounds of funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund which has enabled the park to explore its mining heritage and build a visitor centre that includes a flexible space that is both a cafe and community work space. The archaeologist club has grown out of a series of HLF funded programmes and was incredibly popular, with the parents as well as the young people, and we were nearly bursting out of the room. After the session William and his family showed us around the park they have grown up with and William pointed out some of the work they had completed as part of the funded project. Take a look at the final video here:
Although a flying visit, it was a real pleasure to once again visit a corner of the country that we might otherwise never have encountered and see how much pleasure people are getting from parks and heritage on their doorsteps.
Every summer, the Horniman hosts a large outdoor event and, for the second year, we were invited to capture the community coming together in Forest Hill. This yeah, Africa was the theme for the whole of the summer in the museum and gardens inspired by their incredible African collections. Africarnival was the culmination of all the events and activities that had happened before it.
We were really struck by the scale of the event and the incredible atmosphere across the gardens as audiences watched acrobats, danced to live bands, paraded in the carnival, took dance workshops, ate Ghanian street foods and generally smiled from ear to ear. It was truly joyous to share in the experience with such a diverse crowd that could only be found in London.
One of our favourite projects this year has been documenting the work of resident poet Cheryl Moskowitz at Highfield Primary School in Enfield. We’d worked with Cheryl previously on the fantastic Visual to Vocal project at Dulwich Picture Gallery. We were delighted to work with Cheryl again at Highfield and made six trips over six months to capture the extent that poetry has been embraced in the school. This project has been a very unusual venture in a primary school and even captured the eye of the national press:
It was a real privilege to be involved in documenting this residency and to watch the children develop their love of poetry, win competitions, grow up and build relationships through their work with a professional poet. We covered every part of this incredibly diverse school and felt welcomed into the community over our time there. The films still only really scratch the surface of Cheryl’s work and the school’s commitment to poetry.
Blog post from the Youth Media Agency reporting on the launch of the Young Roots videos we made for the Heritage Lottery Fund:
£50,000 Grants for Young People to Explore Their Heritage
On Monday 7 April Heritage Lottery Fund took over the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge to celebrate the #YoungRoots Grant Programme. #YoungRoots gives up to £50,000 to young people and youth organisations to explore their heritage across the UK.
The event involved a massive takeover of the Museum from Circus performances by the La Bonche Family, speeches from the Olympic medalist Robbie Grabarz and SBTV’s Aaron Roach Bridgeman delivering a bespoke spoken word piece. A diversity of projects were chosen from the 1000′s of young people aged 11-25 that have benefited from the grant and used creativity to explore our rich heritage.
“Heritage plays an important part of our lives and how we see the world. Its great to see so many young people getting excited about exploring theirs, I feel inspired” said Louis John Founder of What’s Good Online.
Highlights from the Event
Part of the event was also about showcasing 3 films co-created by young people, especially Shamara Adams the fantastic MC of the event. The films were produced in order to spread the opportunity as far across the UK as possible. Please be part of the movement and share the film with the #YOUNGROOTS @HERITAGELOTTERY
The Young Roots programme – grants between £10,000 and £50,000 • provides new opportunities for young people aged 11 to 25 to learn about heritage; • allows young people to lead and take part in creative and engaging activities; • develops partnerships between youth organisations and heritage orgs; and • creates opportunities to celebrate young people’s achievements in the project and share their learning with the wider community.
We have traveled up, down and across the country making a recent set of videos. These videos were commissioned by the Heritage Lottery Fund to promote their funding programme called Young Roots.
The heart of Young Roots is the young people who have the ideas, run the projects and gain a whole range of skills and qualifications along the way. To make sure that we were really going to be speaking to our target audience we had a number of consultations with a group of young people who gave us their very knowledgeable and sharp insights into this process.
The young people we met and worked with did a fantastic job of informing and invigorating our approach to the videos. Their discussion of heritage and how to present ideas of heritage was essential in helping us develop the concept for the our initial video. We call it, This is Mine.
After the consultations were complete we went out to visit projects in Newcastle, Forfar (in Scotland), Cardiff and Brixton, London. We had read through a wide variety of projects that we could visit and sadly there were so many that we wanted to visit but restrictions meant we had to limit our visits.
We started in Newcastle and were just as excited as the group we were scheduled to meet:
Getting ready for @acapmedia Hope you have a lovely time w/ @LaBonche Family and are as wowed by the Arthur Fenwick collection @TWArchives
We began walking along the Tyne to get some establishing shots and then walked through town up towards Circus Central and were really taken by the city which neither of us had ever visited before.
When we arrived at the old church that houses Circus Central the group really got our filming for this project off to a bang. Juggling, headstands, unicycles and fancy dress were all de rigueur for the day. These guys were so mature and clearly passionate and excited about their wonderful project it was a real pleasure to film them. After visiting the Discovery Museum and Tyne and Wear Archives we finished the day on a moor just outside the city getting some wonderful action shots that can be seen in the This is Mine video.
Our second visit was up in Scotland and, for a project about Heritage, it was particularly poignant that we were visiting Forfar. The town where my father and grandfather had both been born. Forfar is a small town surrounded by beautiful Scottish countryside.
We walked along the shores of a loch and climbed hills before finally dropping in to meet the gang of young weavers at the PitStop Youth Cafe. The atmosphere at PitStop was very friendly and we immediately felt welcome. It felt like a very open environment where everyone was allowed to make themselves at home and offers of food and cups of tea were plenty. We arrived, it has to be said, with some trepidation as to how excited young people might be about weaving but again we had underestimated these young people. Their passion and enthusiasm was infectious. They showed off their weaving skills, gave us a historical tour of Forfar before taking us to the hidden Angus Archives in the grounds of a ruined church.
Brilliant day yesterday filming with @acapmedia brilliant day full of laughter, #youngroots all the way 🙂 thanks to chris and aaron 😉
Before leaving Scotland I managed to have a brief visit with my dad and grandfather to discuss their memories of Forfar and touch on my own heritage as part of this journey.
It wasn’t long once we got back to London before we were off to Cardiff to film at Cardiff Story Museum and Butetown Youth Pavilion. As with Newcastle our tour through city really took us by surprise, not just the glorious weather that we were very lucky to have but the vibrancy and excitement of the city. Sadly my phone was broken that day so there were no Cardiff tweets despite filming the Castle and Millennium stadium before even getting to the Butetown Pavilion..
We were warned that filming at the Pavilion on this evening might be difficult as it was a girl only evening and we wouldn’t be able to move freely through the building as it was a safe environment for young Muslim women. We were welcomed very warmly and if there were concerns about having two men roaming their corridors they were mostly hidden from us. We were limited for time so flitted between rooms filming art work, group leaders, articulate and funny young women, a small fashion house and an editing suite. We left Butetown to the sounds of laughter and with a clear sense of the excitement and sense of achievement these women had from working on a project with such a broad scope.
Back in London it was a very odd experience to just jump on a number 37 bus to visit visit our next HLF project in Brixton at the Photofusion gallery.
The work of this Organised Youth group was very moving. Their review of the Black Panther UK movement was clearly personal but also grasped the wider ramifications of that work and it was wonderful to see young people tackling these issues in a modern context. We met three young men who gave us a tour of their exhibition, talked us through how they had achieved their goals and then took us up on to the roof of the gallery to let us look down over Brixton Village. It was a really great to be able to leave one of the projects and be able to recommend the output from the young people to my local friends as something that was really worth a visit. Even better is that I know some people did visit and loved their exhibition.
Once filming was complete we had a great deal of footage because everyone had such great positive and meaningful things to tell us but it had to edit down to three short videos. This took a great deal of honing and trimming and once those first drafts were complete we shared them with our Young Media Consultants again and with HLF. A little bit of back and forth between all interested parties has honed these fantastic projects down to these videos. The first focuses on the young people and their journeys while the second is targeted more at youth and heritage leaders who need to be on board to support young people through these projects.
Thank you to everyone involved for an amazing, eye opening experience throughout the project.
This year we really enjoyed working on an inter-generational dance project with Dulwich Picture Gallery. You can read our previous blog about this exciting project HERE.
We made three videos detailing the project which are now available by clicking on the images below:
It was a really special opportunity to work on a longer project with two great groups and a very supportive team. We really felt part of the project and developed some wonderful relationships with the participants. It was fantastic to share their final performance with them.
We have been engaged by Heritage Lottery Fund to create a series of videos to promote their
#YoungRoots funding stream. You can read more about the programme on the HLF Young Roots web page.
Our filming strategy to create three different videos involves visiting a tiny fraction of the projects that are currently happening across the UK and our first stop was with The Family La Bonche in Newcastle. They are a young circus group working with Circus Central who were just as excited about us coming as we were about getting to visit them:
Getting ready for @acapmedia Hope you have a lovely time w/ @LaBonche Family and are as wowed by the Arthur Fenwick collection @TWArchives
This was the first time either of us had been to Newcastle and to say we were pleasantly surprised would be an understatement. The city is beautiful and the riverfront in particular is spectacular.
It manages to feel both large and compact all at the same time with culture round every corner. We spent a good couple of hours filming some location shots of this beautiful city before meeting up with the La Bonches around lunchtime. We walked in on trapeze acts, juggling, and uni-cycling.
It was a real pleasure to meet this group of young people, who really stretched the entire age range of the Young Roots age range 11-25. They are so passionate about their chosen discipline. They had endless energy to repeat tricks and seemed to enjoy impressing us as much as we enjoyed being stunned by their skills.
Lunch was delivered by unicycle, naturally, and juice was balanced on heads before we headed off to the wonderful Discovery Museum which is home to the Tyne and Wear Archives, the partner organisation the group had been working with.
They have been looking into the local archives of circus and fairground memorabilia collected by Arthur Fenwick, the son of a local businessman who had started Fenwicks department stores, after he had returned to the family business following a few years of having run off to the circus: something these young people could easily connect with. Their enthusiasm for circus was such that the archives could never have been boring to them but were instead a treasure trove of heritage and stories. These stories were pouring out of everyone and sadly we already know that very few can make it into our final films.
Once we had finished looking around the archives and learning about women who went shopping with their live pet crocodiles once upon a time in Newcastle (True Story) we juggled and stilt walked back to minibus and headed out to the countryside to a beautiful moor just outside the city limits which is the traditional home of visiting circuses and there we filmed some lovely shots of the young people engaging in their chosen skills. They never failed to impress and kept raising the bar so we got some fantastic footage and had a wonderful day with this family of entertainers who have an amazing Young Roots project and very bright futures.
Sheffield is the home of modern football and, as part of a Sharing Heritage funded programme, some young people from several local schools had come together to research the rich history of football in Sheffield. Their project was culminating the day we arrived with some football games being played by the 1858 Sheffield rules at Hallam Football Club‘s Sandygate grounds, the world’s oldest football ground.
The World’s Oldest Football Ground
Among the project leaders and young people involved we spoke to historian Michael Wood, Cynthia Wainwright from HLF and the day’s referee and president of Hallam FC Uriah Rennie who told us about the different 1858 rules – such as there being no goal keeper and the players being able to catch the ball – and the value and nature of Sharing Heritage funded projects that are available to any not-for-profit organisation interested in exploring their local Heritage.
The games were really interesting and seeing the players pick up and kick the ball made for a fun and exciting experience for everyone. The young people were really getting into the spirit of it with even some of the girls wearing drawn on moustaches and flat caps. With enthusiasm and beautiful weather the scene was set for a wonderful day.
The only problem was that after leaving my cap on the train I got fairly badly sunburnt. Not what I had anticipated from Sheffield.
You can watch the final video here and then learn more from the young people’s research below:
The original 1858 rules are as follows:
1. Kick off from middle must be a place kick.
2. Kick out must not be from more than 25 yards out of goal.
3. Fair Catch is a catch from any player, provided the Ball has not touched the ground, or has not been thrown direct from touch, and entitles to a free kick.
4. Charging is fair in case of a place kick (with the exception of a kick off) as soon as the player offers to kick, but he may always draw back, unless he has actually touched the Ball with his foot.
5. Pushing with the hands is allowed, but no hacking or tripping up is fair under any circumstances whatsoever.
6. No player may be held or pulled over.
7. It is not lawful to take the Ball off the ground (except in touch) for any purpose whatever.
8. The Ball may be pushed or hit with the hand, but holding the Ball (except in the case of a fair kick) is altogether disallowed.
9. A goal must be kicked, but not from touch, nor by a free kick from a catch.
10. A Ball in touch is dead, consequently the side that touches it down must bring it to the edge of touch, and throw it straight out at least six yards from touch.
11. That each player must provide himself with a red and dark blue flannel cap. One colour to be worn by each side during play.
Sheffield boasts a huge range of footballing firsts, identified during the project’s research:
– Sheffield FC (1857) – the world’s oldest club.
– Hallam F.C (1860) – the world’s second oldest club and oldest football ground.
– The Sheffield Rules (1858) had a major influence on the modern game of football, stating that the ball should not be carried by hand, leading to the divergence of football and rugby.
– Bramall Lane – oldest major football ground with the first game played in 1862.
– Recommended a crossbar to the FA (1863).
– Oldest football trophy – Youdan Cup (1867).
– No players other than a goalkeeper could catch the ball (1871).
– The first game under electric-light at Bramall Lane in 1878.
– First insurance scheme for footballers (1860s).
– First radio broadcast of a soccer game (1927): Arsenal v Sheffield United which used a grid to describe the ball’s position on the field thus leading to the expression ‘back to square one’.
The Horniman Youth Panel presented a day of activities for young people and families on a Brazilian or Amazonian theme to coincide with the opening of the new Amazon Adventure exhibition.
There was a whole host of activities on and this video is edited to the music of the BossaRockers who performed three sets in the main Gallery Square area of the museum. Visitors and Staff alike seemed to be enjoying their music filling the spaces between the galleries and bringing an upbeat but relaxed atmosphere to the day.
For familes with young children the highlights seemed to be the face painting which was handled by members of the youth panel. But it wasn’t just the children getting their faces painted.
In the same room there was an opportunity for children to decorate or draw an Amazonian animal and add it to the giant poster that stretched across the whole room. Lot’s of very focused young artists contributed to the finished frieze.
One of the things that really caught the imagination of the young people though seemed to be the photobox that was set up in the Hands on gallery.
Some Amazon themed props – as well as some cowboy hats and fezes – were available for posing in and with. It looked so much fun we couldn’t really resist it ourselves!
The most exciting/repulsive/hilarious/stomach turning part of the day waz the Comamos Insectos activity that pitted contenders against their taste buds to eat a number of disgusting flies, bugs, worms, larvae, grasshoppers and even scorpions!
There was a lot of bravado and a lot of genuine courage. I was so grateful I could refuse on the grounds of vegetarianism cos there nothing that looked appealing on that menu!
A really vibrant day that was especially impressive as it was organised and run by the Youth Panel Members themselves!
The Body Adorned is a fascinating exhibition that has recently opened at south London’s cultural gem, The Horniman Museum, exploring how body adornment has become part of London life across times and cultures
Back in January, acapmedia were invited to make the above trailer to help promote the exhibition, which was due to open in March. So we had the task of making a trailer for something that didn’t quite exist yet. The first step was to speak to Wayne Modest, the exhibition curator, or, as we learnt through interviewing him, the co-curator. The exhibition has been co-curated by two groups of young Londoners that have been working with the museum over the past few years. Speaking with Wayne it became clear how integral the work of the young people had been and how important it was to the Horniman team.
As we were already lined up to interview some of the Horniman Youth Panel and photography group, we were asked to make another video to complement the trailer that describes the relationship between the young people and the museum. Everyone spoke honestly and positively, explaining the co-curation process and were all hopeful for the beneficial relationship with the museum to continue. We had a great time talking to the young people and hearing their stories about how their work with the museum inspired and helped them grow. The enthusiasm from everyone involved in the exhibition was clear and shows the museum’s commitment to ensuring young peoples’ voices are heard.
The exhibition was officially launched on 27 March by special guest Vivienne Westwood who spoke describing her love for the museum. You can see some of the pics and tweets here
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