What’s on : Lectures

‘Parklife’ past, present and future: the Whitworth Park Community Archaeology and History project

Lectures
Date
24 Feb 2015
Start time
7:30 PM
Venue
Tempest Anderson Hall
Speaker
Prof. Sian Jones
‘Parklife’ past, present and future: the Whitworth Park Community Archaeology and History project

Event Information

‘Parklife’ past, present and future: the Whitworth Park Community Archaeology and History project

Sian Jones, Professor of Archaeology, School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, University of Manchester

Public parks are important components of urban landscapes in the UK. Their origins lie in the nineteenth century ‘park movement’, which was a response to the immense changes associated with industrialisation and urbanisation. They were intended to provide green spaces for leisure, exercise, instruction and promotion of good health. Once part of the urban landscape, however, public parks also operated as sites of social encounter, tension and exclusion through which class, gender, civic, and national identities were negotiated. Although many urban parks have changed beyond recognition, they remain important places for the negotiation of memory, identity and place, as well as a focus for ideas associated with health, pollution, and the environment.

In this lecture, Siân Jones will show how public archaeology provides a means to engage people with this heritage, whilst also promoting an investment in the future of urban parks. She will discuss the Whitworth Park Community Archaeology and History Project, which uses archival, archaeological, and oral historical research to examine the changing role of the urban park. At the same time the project is intended to encourage community engagement and participation, through voluntary work, school workshops and public events. She will argue that historic objects, monuments and places offer a unique opportunity to facilitate forms of community connectivity across time and space, producing a tangible sense of connection and allowing people to negotiate networks of belonging in complex urban landscapes.

Report

Manchester’s Whitworth Park, opened in 1890 from the generous bequest of engineer and industrialist Sir Joseph Whitworth, was typical of many created as part of the ‘park movement’ in the later 19th century. After decades of industrialisation, urban parks were a force for good, physically health-giving and spiritually uplifting. To the lawns, trees, flowerbeds and boating lakes were added educational elements, in this case the Whitworth Art Gallery and a weather observatory, all promoting good middle-class values of civic pride and self-improvement.

As in many other towns and cities, however, the park’s early sustained popularity was followed by post-World War Two decline, which might have been terminal but for the advent of Heritage Lottery funding. Recent refurbishment had seen the art gallery reopen just ten days before this talk, which concluded with an outline of the park’s community archaeology and history project, encouraging local people from all backgrounds to engage with their past to secure its future.

Bob Hale