Case Study - Discover Beighton

Programme: Your Heritage
Applicant: Eventus Ltd
Grant awarded: £49,800
Project length: 18 Months

Discover Beighton - printable (MS Word, 324KB)

Summary

Beighton is an ex-mining village on the outskirts of Sheffield with a population of 4,700. The village has a rich mining and farming heritage; it forms part of the earliest working mine areas of the South Yorkshire Coalfield. The loss of the pits and subsequent low skilled workforce and high levels of unemployment has led to a lack of community identity and pride. Discover Beighton, which ran alongside a wider programme of European Union-funded Objective 1 activity in the area, was a community based oral history and archive project which allowed the people of Beighton to identify and celebrate their heritage.

The aims of the project

To develop an oral history archive and create a digital archive of local photos and films.
To produce and maintain a user-friendly website to host the Beighton community archive and to create publications and heritage walks drawing on information collected by the residents.

Benefits for heritage

Forty interviews documenting life in the village were recorded, transcribed and deposited in Sheffield Archives and the National Coal Mining Museum. Extracts were used on the website, in a book, in a school resource pack and on Radio Sheffield.
Additional material was documented and archived during six themed archiving days.
A new village trail leaflet, produced by an art group and distributed to local venues including libraries and pubs, celebrates the heritage of the village.

Benefits for people

Following a local recruitment campaign, ten village residents gained employment and training to work on the oral histories, including some long-term unemployed and disabled people who used the project as a means to return to work.
Six volunteers were trained to build and maintain the website.
Visits to regional museums and archives, a fete, archiving days and creative writing workshops brought people of all ages together to share memories and photographs and help create a published book and content for the website.
The creative writing group performed their work publicly as part of Adult Learners Week, helping others to discover the heritage Beighton.
School children from three primary schools have studied local history from resource packs that were created from the archived materials and eight young people involved in a holiday project used the oral histories as the basis for their animated film about Beighton, learning new skills and confidence in the process.

Lessons learnt

The planned time scale of one year was too short for all the project activities.
The time needed to work with a large number of community interviewers and transcribers was underestimated: interviewers needed time to develop skills and confidence and the administration involved in copying and transcribing interviews was heavier than anticipated.
Full transcriptions of all interviews are not necessary and can slow a project down See our guidance Thinking about oral history for more advice on these issues.

Long term benefits

The project has helped the community identify and celebrate its heritage, providing a catalyst for regeneration and increasing pride about living in Beighton.
The Beighton community website can be accessed as a continuing resource.

The budget

Main Project Costs	£	Funding	£
Design / writing / printing education material	2,683	Other grants	11,429
Equipment / materials	31,020	Non-cash contributions	1,000
Staff / recruitment	3,450	HLF grant (%)	49,800
Training	21,000
		Total costs	61,229

Exploring the mining heritage of Beighton

Sector

Industry, Maritime and Transport

Activity

Conservation; Learning