Author: Larissa Allwork

At the Centre for Hidden Histories led Discovery Day in Leicester (4 September 2017), I was fortunate to catch-up with Associate Professor Nigel Hunt about the ‘Belper in Wartime’ project.  This project arose from a Centre for Hidden Histories event in Chesterfield. Nigel met Adrian Farmer, a representative of Belper’s World War One Working Group.  At the start of the Centenary, this group had won a Heritage Lottery Fund grant to research the individuals listed on the Belper War Memorial and produce a community history book about ‘Belper in Wartime’. Nigel suggested that as a follow-on project, the Belper Working Group should collaborate with the Centre for Hidden Histories and research life in Belper after the First World War.   A key research question would be to consider how men returning from the trenches adapted or struggled to reintegrate into postwar Belper community life. Newspapers have been a key source of information for this project as has witness testimony recorded from descendants.

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On 10th September 2017, the ‘In the Wrong Place, at the Wrong Time’ team held a free heritage open day for the public at Lofthouse Gate Working Men’s Club. The purpose of the day was to explore the hidden history of Lofthouse Park, one of Britain’s internment camps during the First World War. Now comprising a combination of housing estates, car parks and convenience stores, the site of Lofhouse Park is virtually unrecognisable from its World War One era incarnation. Dr Claudia Sternberg and David Stowe organised the day to provide descendants, local people and World War One history enthusiasts with the opportunity to engage with this difficult and often forgotten history.

David Stowe led a guided tour of the sites that would have comprised the former Lofthouse Park Internment camp where Germans, Turks and Austro-Hungarians were interned during the war. Participants in the tour were introduced to the testimony of Paul Cohen Portheim. They were also shown the sites of South Camp, North Camp and West Camp and told about the organisation of the institution, particularly the daily routine of its prisoners, many of whom were from the social elite of early nineteenth century, Anglo-German, German and European society. There is currently no commemorative plaque to mark the camp, but Claudia, Dave and illustrator Louise Atkinson have put together a map of Lofthouse Park to encourage members of the public to engage with its First World War history.

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Led by Dr Nick Baron, The COREL Project (Curating Online Resources for Engagement and Learning) has been working with the Life Lines community group in order to develop an easy to use and accessible online platform for presenting textual materials. A work in progress, it is hoped that the final platform will enable the display of documents held by archives, libraries, museums or private collections. In the course of developing specifications and a prototype of the platform, the COREL project worked with World War One era documents contributed by Life Lines members as well as materials from the University of Nottingham’s Sir George Buchanan collection. As part of the co-productive elements of this project, Nick employed Culture Syndicates, a Nottingham based Heritage and Arts consultancy company. This was in order to assist with building the relationship with Life Lines and organising key activities like focus groups. I caught up with Nick and Charlotte Pratley, Director of Culture Syndicates. We discussed the contribution that companies like Culture Syndicates make to the co-production process between universities and community partners.

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