Telling Tang Hall
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"It's interesting because Tang Hall - I just think
"Oh it's Tang Hall, it's nothing special"
but then when I hear a fact it pleasantly surprises
you and it gives you this feeling of happiness
because it's like I didn't expect this"
(Workshop Participant / Local Storyteller)
Stories, Places and Connection
How connected do you feel to your neighbourhood? Do you know your neighbours or whose door you could knock on if you need help? Less and less of us do, with fewer opportunities to work and play locally together having serious implications for both individuals and communities.
It’s been said that stories are the glue that holds communities together, “stories first, communities second” according to Joe Lambert the founder of the Digital Storytelling Centre. This idea to take a closer look at the potential of place-based digital storytelling to strengthen neighbourhood connections.
During the winter 2018/2019, my colleague and I, both mature students at the University of York, worked with people who live, work, study or visit regularly in Tang Hall. We used it's recent and not so recent past to challenge existing perceptions of the area by telling new stories.
A standard street map tells you where a place is, a Deep Map (aka a Story Map), tells you how a place is. Deep Maps are made from layers of local 'stories', interweaving memories, folklore, geography, history, science and imagination. It's been said that they are never finished, "a conversation rather than a statement".
This webpage is a Deep Map of Tang Hall.
Melrosegate Field, Tang Hall.
Photo: CYC
"Now I'd describe Tang Hall as 'Innovative' - which is surprising but there are so many 'firsts' here"
"Now I'd describe Tang Hall as 'Innovative'
which is surprising but there are so many 'firsts' here"
(Website Visitor, Survey Comment)
(Re)Telling Tang Hall
The (re)telling of Tang Hall was done via small group workshops, run at the Burnholme Centre and the Tang Hall Community Centre, which were broken down into three caffeine and cake fuelled activities.
First, armed with paper and coloured pens, we each drew a cognitive map, which is just a map of how we perceive Tang Hall - the picture we have in our heads and based on our own experiences. This brought Tang Hall front and centre in our minds. Afterwards, talking about our maps we began to identify boundaries and special places; many individual but some shared.
Next, we all chose three images from the twenty archive items selected for Tang Hall and laid out on the table in no particular order. The stories behind these images were spoken out loud before each image was laid onto a large aerial photograph (in the appropriate place). This kicked off, with a fair amount of surprise, conversations around the personal meaning of the past and present in these places.
The final workshop activity involved each person creating a short digital story. These consisted of images and narration; some life histories and others focused on just one point of personal interest. Some of these can be watched below.
Author's Personal 'cognitive map' of Tang Hall.
Photo: Project Team
Aerial photograph of Tang Hall overlaid with archive content..
Photo: Project Team
Click on the images below to watch short video stories created in Tang Hall
Raiding the Archives: 2000 yrs of Tang Hall
Most of us are familiar with the idea of oral history, where the memories of one or more people - usually older people - are recorded; capturing accounts of how life was lived in the past. Although, personal accounts are at the heart of deep mapping and recorded oral histories can be seen as a type of 'digital storytelling', in our project we didn't aim to create more history but to take what we already know about Tang Hall's past and to use this to deliberately disrupt how we think and feel about the place today and how it might be in the future.
This meant raiding York's archives, specifically, the images and information held in the City of York Council's Historic Environment Record, Explore York, York Archaeology Trust and Tang Hall History Group. There's a lot of it, going back at least 2000 years to Roman Tang Hall. Way too much for all of it to be included in a single project. To get around this we asked the archivists/collections managers to choose a selection of items they thought would be of most interest to people from Tang Hall and supplemented these 'official' sources with local knowledge and personal memories.
