Discover Your High Street Project Celebration Event
On the 10th April 2017 we held an event in the London Living Room at City Hall, where we invited Heritage Partners, volunteers and representatives from arts and cultural organisations to join us to celebrate and reflect upon the Heritage Lottery Funded element of The Streets project: Discover Your High Street.
Hosted by Jumoké Fashula, (BBC Radio London) we heard from a multitude of speakers who each shared unique insights into the project and its extraordinary impact.
We were privileged to be joined by Stuart Hobley, the Head of Heritage Lottery Fund London who spoke about the importance of projects such as Discover Your High Street project and thanked National Lottery Players for the impact of their purchases. Following this, our Keynote Speaker, Robert Elms (BBC Radio London) shared his own fascinating experiences of London’s heritage, through fond childhood memories in the city, encouraging the audience to use the project as a catalyst to “go out and discover”.
After hearing a detailed overview of the project from the Discover Your High Street team, representatives from Blue Orange, Redbridge College spoke of their involvement with Discover Your High Street through taking part in a photography project to contribute to our publication.
Later on, Chenine Bhathena, Senior Cultural Strategy Officer from the Greater London Authority, expanded on the contribution projects such as The Streets and Discover Your High Street make to the Mayor of London’s Cultural Strategy. Finally, Director of Serious, Claire Whitaker, OBE, gave an insight into the relationship between The Streets and Discover Your High Street.
Each delegate also received a project ‘toolkit’ which included case studies detailing working on cross borough arts and heritage projects. We also gave information on working with volunteers and heritage partners to share our learnings with the wider sector.
A question and answer session to conclude the afternoon certainly demonstrated an appetite for further collaborative events and projects of this nature in the future.
During this event, we launched our project publication which thematically explores the shared heritage of our seven outer London boroughs. The publication includes images, maps and text to illustrate the rich history of the areas and is currently being distributed across the boroughs to schools, libraries, museums and local businesses free of charge with thanks to the generous support of the Heritage Lottery Fund.