Oakmere Solutions Ltd

Hudd Music Hall Archive: bringing to life the stories of the past

2011-11-04T15:50:00.001Z

Music Hall, and its successor, Variety, are significant and enduring elements of UK Heritage and popular culture. As artistic forms the Music Hall and Variety continue to inform and inspire contemporary entertainment and social commentary by offering rich insights into the lives and cultural practices of previous generations. The Music Hall in particular, with its origins in the new style pub entertainment of the1830’s, and popularity peak in the period 1850 to 1930, offers through the words and music of the time a singular insight into the past particularly of the urban working class in an area that may be otherwise “hidden by history”. Through its portrayal of both the everyday and historically dramatic the history and artefacts of the Music Hall paints a vivid and resonant picture of how people found comfort and solidarity in laughter, story and music. Indeed the Music Hall and Variety were the life-blood of popular entertainment from the mid nineteenth century until television established itself in the sixties. In 1957 John Osborne, in The Entertainer wrote:

“The music hall is dying, and with it, a significant part of England. Some of the heart of England has gone; something that once belonged to everyone, for this was truly a folk art.”

Today the legacy of Music Hall and Variety can be found in buildings, texts, photographs, music scores, and memorabilia. However much of the history of the Music Hall and Variety is unrecorded and where it does exist is insufficiently curated, interpreted or accessible. The Hudd Archive Project seeks to address this by creating a living and accessible archive with both national and local elements which has public value whilst making available rich material for contemporary users. The collection offers both intrinsic heritage value and the potential for adding value by the interpretation and re-purposing of the material in a range of media and socially relevant activities.

The core of the project rests with the unique collections of Music Hall texts, scores and memorabilia owned by the actor and historian Dr Roy Hudd. The collection offers a range of performance materials, historical documents and memorabilia which will provide the bedrock of a living exhibition of performance and education resources which both celebrate and employ the creative excellence of the material itself and open up new opportunities to study the social and historical contexts in which it was performed.

The project has receive HLF support and Oakmere Solutions are delighted to have been appointed to provide project leadership and professional curation services to the project. The project will formally launch in January 2012 and will run until summer 2013.

Culture of the Countryside

2011-07-23T19:03:00.003+01:00

Oakmere Solutions Director Sharon Goddard has been a member of the Culture of the Countryside project steering group since its inception in 2008. Commenting on this following the final meeting of the steering group she said:

"It has been a privilege to be a member of the steering group for the Culture of the Countryside project. The project, run by the Sainsbury Centre at the University of East Anglia and funded by the HLF, has been ambitious - using the Centre's world art collection to inspire East Anglians to explore the culture and heritage of their countryside. It’s been a fascinating journey. The project has used objects such as carvings from Papua New Guinea to prompt exploration of local traditions of church carvings and Central American amulets to stimulate discussion about the significance of local charms such as corn dollies. The project has reinforced the value of using objects in learning and has raised intriguing questions about how art from other parts of the world can help us develop new insights and an enriched understanding of our own cultural experiences."

For further information go to: http://www.cultureofthecountryside.ac.uk

HLF consultation launched

2011-02-09T11:19:00.003Z

The Heritage Lottery Fund have launched a public consultation on the future of Lottery funding for the heritage from 2013-2019. Given current cuts in the public sector in the UK its interesting to note that the HLF share of Lottery 'good causes' income will increase from 16.7% to 20% by 2012-2013, an extra £50m. This means that from 2013-2019 the HLF will have an annual awards budget of around £300m. Clearly this 'good news' needs to be set against the reductions in central and local government spending on the heritage over the same period. Nonetheless it represents a clear opportunity and Oakmere Solutions will be responding to the consultation.

More specifically HLF seek views on:

what it should be doing;
what it might do differently;
proposals for new initiatives or measures.

Oakmere Solutions will suggest that work to secure and make accessible the heritage has still greater potential to build community cohesion and capacity, promote education and learning and support health and wellbeing. We will propose that these, often intangible and poorly evaluated outcomes become more prominent in grant-giving and that further work be undertaken to establish and refine measures to assess and articulate the social, economic and environmental benefits of investment in the heritage.

You can register and respond to the consultation by 26 April 2011 at http://www.hlf.org.uk/consultation2011

Heritage and the common good

2010-05-12T18:23:00.003+01:00

Amitai Etzioni writing in 2004 suggests: "The common good is much more than the aggregation of all private or personal goods. It includes things that serve no one in particular, like preserving our national monuments, and it serves members of generations not yet born, as for instance does basic research. Contributions to the common good often offer no immediate benefits, and frequently it is impossible to predict on whom such benefits will fall in the long run. Still, we invest... because we consider it a good to be nourished."

Investment in the heritage is often seen as supporting some concept of the 'common good'. As such it is contentious. Nonetheless Etzioni encourages us to think beyond the pure economic return on heritage investment to explore the more intrinsic, personal and community impact and value heritage generates. Can this be measured or can it only be implied? is the comparison with fundamental research valid, and if so can we use methodologies employed to assess the value of such research in calculating the value of investment in the heritage?

2012: creating heritage

2010-03-07T19:19:00.003Z

The 2012 London Olympic and Paralympic Games will create different legacies. One of these will be a lived heritage for those who took part, whether as competitors, administrators, service workers or volunteers. Whilst elements of this will be reported in the media, much will live on in the memories and oral histories of individuals. Capturing and making available these oral histories will be a key task for those interested in establishing a 'lived' legacy of the Games. Maybe something heritage organisations may wish to commission?

Assessing the value of the heritage

2010-02-28T17:17:00.003Z

How we assess the value of the heritage is a complex and contested issue. Its not simply that there are different methodologies, but rather that the value of the heritage (whether a work of art, a historic building, a landscape or an oral history) is often implicit rather than explicit. A lived emotion rather than something we purchase (and consequently defined by a monetary value). Yet establishing a common or shared value for a piece of heritage is often a pre-requisite for securing the resources necessary to conserve it, or make it accessible. This challenge of valuing heritage is therefore one which requires a multi-disciplinary approach.