It’s been a while since I posted an update! Planning for the Bradford events while trying to keep up some of the research momentum meant that I broke out of the habit, but I hope to try to provide weekly updates in the months ahead. There’s lots of things to update on, but I thought it would be worthwhile to offer an overview of the various Bradford events that I was involved in planning and delivering, while these are still relatively fresh. I hope these reflections will be useful background to our joint Bradford events workshop in July.

General

I really enjoyed spending time in Bradford, after so many months of poring over historic maps of the area and arranging Teams meetings with our local partners. It was not my first time in Bradford, but it is not a city that I know well, and I was acutely conscious of my capacity as an outsider throughout these events. It’s only very rarely that I’ve spent time in a place where the gap between my recently acquired understanding of its past and my detachment from its present was so pronounced. For many of our Bradford partners, as for community historians and groups elsewhere, history is something which is closely intertwined with issues in the present - for some, history is directly relevant to their work, while for others it is a facet of local politics, or an important part of their sense of individual, family, and community identity. Getting on the train to leave Bradford at the end of the events underscored for me the distance that separates the work of historical research conducted via fibre optic cable in Glasgow, London, or Cambridge, and the constant tick of lived historical experience in Bradford. I wouldn’t suggest that this distance is unique to the CE project, but it’s one that the workshops really brought to life for me in a way that was impossible to ignore. Being forced to reckon with this distance is one of the many great advantages of doing history with local communities, and something which I am still processing.

I particularly enjoyed the time that we spent as a team, and the various discussions that we had between and after events - I hope that we have more opportunities to do this over the coming months. Perhaps a ‘writing retreat’ when our attention turns fully to the writing stage?

Millponds and rivers mapping event - May 16th

Daniel and I delivered the millponds and rivers mapping event at Kala Sangam on the Thursday. The event was well attended, with partners from Bradford City Council, Friends of Bradford’s Becks, Bradford Industrial Museum, Lost Mills and Ghost Mansions, and others.

The principle of the workshop was to use the online mapping tool Felt to add instances of rivers and millponds on old ordnance survey maps, working in groups and discussing along the way what we were learning. From the beginning, we knew that some aspects of this workshop might prove challenging: we had a range of participants in the room, from experts in GIS mapping with decades of experience, to novices who had never plotted anything on a map before. At the beginning of the workshop, there was a little bit of tension as a few questions from the audience seemed to suggest that the whole exercise had been ‘done before’. In subsequent discussions, it would emerge that what counted as ‘done’ can vary very widely across disciplines: while for urban planners it might often be sufficient to have data on current and past river courses, the traceability of these sources to maps from specific years may not be as important as it could be to a historian. Meanwhile, other datasets that do link river courses to specific years may do so only in a patchwork manner. Tasha and I previously encountered a version of this in the flooding data openly available through Ordnance Survey: while vector data on areas that have flooded since 1930 is available, it is not broken down into individual flooding events. Moreover, there is a further accessibility issue in that much historic environment data is relatively hard to access, let alone visualise without the necessary skills: in these instances, the added advantages of ‘learning by doing’ might justify the production of new data even where it might already exist.

Nevertheless, I do think that the workshop did underline that the value of our work in this area is usually not going to be in the creation of new GIS datasets - this is really the realm of professional specialists. But identifying datasets that could do with enriching or making more accessible/malleable/linkable to historians and the public is definitely a worthwhile outcome.

The combination of identifying ‘gaps’ in different datasets with the more experienced participants, together with the enthusiasm of others to try further mapping exercises in the future, meant that the discussions ended up with some very encouraging takeaways.

For my part, I am especially keen to follow up with Robert Hellawell to produce an accessible map that brings together the datasets that he is interested in, including images produced by urban explorers and archival plans of Bradford culverts, that might aid the work of the Aire Rivers Trust and Friends of Bradford’s Becks.

Bradford Becks public event at Bradford Industrial Museum - May 25th

image of Friends of Bradford Becks volunteer adding points to a map, by Tejala Rao

The idea that turnout could be a limiting factor for the Bradford Becks public event at BIM is not something that had weighed too much on our minds in the planning for this event. From discussions that we had with staff, the museum was unusually quiet for a saturday, something which was perhaps impacted by it being half-term, as well as a sunny day which people may have preferred to spend outside. Despite the relatively low turnout, we had some really great interactions with volunteers from FoBB and visitors. The map that Tasha, Daniel and I had prepared ended up being populated with a colourful range of points of interest, and the craft table was a hive of activity for most of the day. We also discovered that Tejala is an elite-level player of the FoBB board game ‘Drain of Thrones’.

Tasha has had a very inventive idea for converting the points on the map into a Felt map which might serve as a snapshot of the day, with pictures of the cards and of the event uploaded into the map, alongside reflections from her, Daniel and myself. This would be a very nice way also of following up with FoBB afterwards - we might also be able to invite Irene to contribute some aspects of Fagley Beck history which she didn’t get the chance to perform.

Once Upon a Sheep screening at Bradford Industrial Museum - May 25th