Sutton Grapevine

Stories about Sutton-in-the-Isle, Cambridgeshire, UK

Archive for How we made this

The Physical and Virtual

October 18, 2009 at 9:32 pm · Filed under Activities, How we made this and tagged: , ,

Sutton Grapevine was not about access to technology but about using physical activities and online technologies to reveal the texture of life in the village. It was an experimental project using a variety of media to reveal the flavour of the life, place and identity in a rural village undergoing change. One of the aims of Sutton Grapevine was not to present solutions, but to explore and illuminate the issues; and in particular to demonstrate the role of cultural space and cultural activity in enabling that process to take place.

Sutton Grapevine is an example of what could be done by local people using readily available medias and transferrable techniques. In the process we’ve gathered stories through interviews and chance encounters, running workshops and events, conducting interviews, attending clubs and groups, visiting events, working with a youth group, organising a BBQ, exploring the local area by bike, foot and car, staging an exhibit in the Babylon Gallery Ely and through suttongrapevine.org. We heard talk of Winston Churchill’s uncle, Clement Freud’s first election to Parliament and rumours of Princess Margaret. There were tales of Sutton schoolteachers and flying blackboard rubbers, of lying at the end of the Mepal airfield runway watching the bombers take off and of elusive landlords; from ice skating on the Hundered foot Drain down at Sutton Gault to the day the Sutton Tandoori came to town: from being squashed by cows, rampant bulls and one legged milking stools to duck races, inland tides, kayaking on the river, homebaking and how four years of dedication and careful archaeology revealed an ancient burial urn.

We have met with many people and been grateful for the generous welcome we have been given.  The stories gathered are available on line and as an archived on an audio cd and the story of the project is available as an eBook to download print and make up. A number of these will be distributed throughout the village and Proboscis will continue to maintain Sutton Grapevine as a project site.

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Where We Went

October 18, 2009 at 9:29 pm · Filed under Activities, How we made this, Stories and tagged: , ,

When we began the project our initial research was based on visits to Sutton to make contact with people and to get an impression of life in the village and we were greatly supported by the Feast Committee. We investigated the different communities that live in the village as well as the history and landscape of the area and people’s relationship to it. For two reasons it was important to us to begin the project by getting to know Sutton and its inhabitants. Firstly an essential aspect to working in a community is to establish trust, and secondly we were concerned that the project we undertook should fit into current activities. We began by making a number of visits to Sutton to meet and talk to people there and to get an impression of life in the village.  During our visits we spoke with many people who have a wide range of roles within the village. We found that Sutton has a strong identity for residents who make a clear distinction from other villages nearby. Residents we spoke to told us that the village had recently undergone an increase in its commuter population. A few times people mentioned the planned development of Sutton which would increase the population. We made connections with a range of people including the Triangle Club, a group of elderly residents, the Youth Club, the WI, the Feast Committee, the Parish Council, St Andrews Church, the Curry Clubs, local business people, farmers, commuters and other individuals, and over the year undertook many activities including:

Babylon Gallery Exhibit: We set up a map and postcards to collect visitors’ stories for Sutton Grapevine and promote the project. People were encouraged to write or draw their stories and pin them down on the map, or record them. Through this we connected with two villagers who then went on to record a series of wonderful stories for the project that can be hear on this site.

Sutton Seniors Youth Group: We worked with the group on a session using a large map of Sutton and to map – with the help of string, paper, storycubes and modeling clay  – what is in Sutton now and what people might like to see in Sutton in the future and recorded the groups stories of what they had created.  After this we all decided to work together on some low tech animation asking the question “What is Sutton like?”

Triangle Club: We met the Triangle Club for seniors on two afternoons, mapping  their memories of Sutton, and recording and listening to stories of people, spaces and events that marked their lives.

Tea Dance: We set up a table with a map outside the Tea Dance at the Glebe and used the map to start conversations and record a series of memories and stories as people left the Tea Dance.

BBQ at Painters Lane: A villager and her family kindly offered their home and garden to be used to host a BBQ for residents of Painters Lane who had a wealth of stories about Sutton to share, how they came to be in Sutton, how the Lane has changed, life in the village as a commuter, what there is (or isn’t) for young people.

One-stop shop: We set up a table with a large map outside the one stop shop on a couple of occasions to entice the steady flow of people on a Saturday morning to stop and to record stories.

Election Day: An evening  spent outside Sutton Polling Station gathering stories around a map during election day.

Curry Clubs: We were lucky enough join the Ladies Curry Club and visit the mens Curry Club to gather stories. As well as describing life in Sutton the recordings give an insight into the experiences that are Sutton Curry nights.

Allotments: We visited Sutton allotments and recorded stories from two holders. Many people grow their own food in Sutton and the issue of food and where to buy it often came up in conversation.

Feast Week 2009: We exhibited  Sutton Grapevine at the annual  Feast. There was be a display and audio in St Andrews Church and we joined various Feast Events. We also held a wee Tea and Cakes afternoon for some residents who had contributed.

School Fete: We set up a Sutton Grapevine station at the School Fete during the Feast, and invited children to cut out and make felt pictures of their stories of Sutton. We asked them to tell us what they had made and recorded their replies on Gabcast.

You can hear edited excerpts from all the above including from the many conversations we recorded with individuals on this site.

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Technologies

October 18, 2009 at 9:05 pm · Filed under Activities, How we made this and tagged: , ,

Sutton Grapevine was not about access to technology but about using physical activities and online technologies to reveal the texture of life in the village. Where we’ve used technologies they’ve been those that people already use or could easily adopt:

suttongrapevine.org; is a free WordPress Blog.  We use podbean a free podcasting service where we upload audio files to our account on podbean, and the most recent podcasts automatically appear on the this blog. Gabcast; is a low cost service that lets people record a story over the phone. The recordings were automatically uploaded to Gabcast and later  linked to this blog. The strength of Gabcast is that no internet connection is required and the cost was low. But it is difficult to tell stories into a telephone so it seems to work best as part of organised activities. AudioBoo allows iPhone users to make short digital recordings with photographs which can be posted online. It was used by the team to make short recordings around the village from time to time. Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables people to post and read short notices that appeare immediately on the website as well as being were delivered to subscribers.  Its immediacy makes it work well in ad hoc situations. As a result of twitter we gathered additional stories about the area.

Recordings were made on a variery of equipment spanning price ranges including £10 voice recorders; a Sony Minidisk Recorder and mic; an iPod, an iPhone and a Marantz digital audio recorder. Audio was later edited in Garageband. The Marantz is a professional recorder but looks a bit like an old fashioned tape recorder so people barley notice it which we  found to be invaluable as people are often a put off by a  microphone being pointed at them. The iPod Classic and iPhone are both easy to use but the battery life is short with the iPod and sound levels are not as high as with the Marantz. The minidisk and mic is good quality easy to use and economical choice though it is not digital. We also used some small digital audio recorders by Olympus which were very handy.

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Gathering Stories

October 18, 2009 at 8:37 pm · Filed under Activities, How we made this and tagged: , , ,

Proboscis were commissioned in 2008 by ADeC (Arts Development in East Cambridgeshire) to “create a space where local residents have the room to explore place and identity through creative activity that is based in both the physical world and on-line. That has an existence in the real world and virtual spaces.” In response to this we created Sutton Grapevine.

In Sutton Grapevine the exploration of place and identity focused on stories; personal stories, stories of place, fictional and factual stories, stories told through words, through images, through sound.

Over the last year we have been gathering stories through about life in Sutton through interviews and chance encounters, running workshops and events, conducting interviews, attending clubs and groups, visiting events, working with the youth group,  a BBQ, exploring the local area by bike, foot and car, staging an exhibit in the Babylon Gallery Ely and through this website.

We worked with both groups and individuals in different situations. With groups we joined existing community group sessions but we also set up specific activities with groups such as three sessions with the youth group or the barbeque. We also organised more ad hoc sessions to engage passers by such as being outside the shop, in the tithe sale and at the school fete. We met people in the day and into the evening. We also set up two exhibits as a catalyst for conversation, one early on at the Babylon Gallery and one during the Feast. We had conversations in the Glebe, the Church, the Community Room, and other community spaces, at the school fete, in the street, outside the shop, in the pub and with individuals in their homes, at work and outside.

In many cases we set up a table with a large map of the Sutton and asked people to write on post-it notes their memories and thoughts about the village, places they knew or events they remembered, we used this to begin conversations about life in Sutton.  The post its became a catalyst for more conversations as other people stopped to read them.  We also used triggers to start conversations such as postcards that we had made of the village and historical documents and images loaned by a villager. We have met with many groups and individuals and been grateful for the warm welcome we have been given. We have never ceased to be inspired by how hard people work for their community as volunteers. In many ways large and small we felt that the stories of Sutton seemed to be a microcosm of the stories of the UK.

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Outside the One-Stop

July 8, 2009 at 4:11 pm · Filed under Activities, How we made this

Outside the One-Stop shop on a sunny Saturday

Outside the One-Stop shop on a sunny Saturday

Orlagh and I took up a pitch outside the One-Stop shop on Saturday morning to encourage people to listen to the stories about Sutton. We were letting them know that we would be around some of the Feast events playing the recordings we’ve made and also promoting this blog as a way of listening to the stories.

We were using an iPod attached to an iTrip device to play the recordings over a radio. A very nice moment happened when a gentleman came past who Orlagh had recorded a couple of weeks ago and she was able to play him his own recording. He was telling us all about his involvement in Sutton Cricket Club – apparently the team won their match last week!

Handing out postcards

Handing out postcards

The One-Stop is a busy place on a Saturday morning and I handed out many of our new postcards before we had to pack up to head off to the Tithe Sale. Hopefully some of them will drop by this website to listen to the stories and read what we’ve been up to!

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What are you growing?

July 1, 2009 at 2:10 am · Filed under Activities, How we made this, Stories and tagged: , , , , , , ,

During our stay near Sutton in June I was lucky to be invited, by Roger, to visit one patch of Sutton allotments. He explained to me how the allotments had grown more popular in recent years after a small group had got together and reinvigorated them. Now the number of holders has grown from a handful to over 30.  You can read about then on the allotments website. It was fantastic to see Roger’s inspirational allotment, taste some of its just ripened strawberries and see and hear about the huge range of what people are growing. You  can hear a list of one allotment holders summer crop on the podcast section of this website with more allotment stories to come…  If you are growing things in Sutton send something about it to the grapevine – what else are people growing?

When I first got to know Sutton I had thought it ironic that here on the fens, breadbasket of England, the food from the large farms heads off to the supermarkets and not into the village where, these days, there is no greengrocer anyway. So its been inspiring to meet so many people who grow and share their own in gardens and allotments as well as all the honesty shops where I enjoyed picking up baby beetroot among other things.

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Behind Closed Doors

June 19, 2009 at 2:02 pm · Filed under Activities, How we made this, Stories and tagged: , , , , , , , ,

A closed-looking Sutton Tandoori, site of the LCC

A closed-looking Sutton Tandoori, site of the LCC

When I was in Sutton recently I was lucky enough to go for dinner with the Ladies Curry Club. Obviously I can’t tell you all of what went on as the ladies need to preserve their mystery, but I can tell you that they were good enough to let me record their answers to some questions about Sutton. I’ve just uploaded three of these recordings to the podcast section of this website with many more to come. As well as describing how these ladies came to end up living in Sutton, I hope the recordings will give you a little insight into the fabulous experience that is Sutton Ladies Curry night..

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Aeroplanes and Birds

June 18, 2009 at 9:54 am · Filed under Activities, How we made this and tagged: , ,

After meeting the seniors Youth Group last month we all decided to work together on their video for their Your Stories Project. The group recently went to Copenhagen to share stories with a diverse group of young people from several countries.

We have been making low tech animation, including this bit of some excitement on the flight home when an unfortunate bird was caught in the plane engine, to combine with clips from the footage the group shot on the trip.

Aeroplanes and birds dont mix from Proboscis on Vimeo.

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Farming to Tandoori

June 5, 2009 at 11:19 pm · Filed under Activities, Contributing Your Story, How we made this

A day of talking to villagers and recording stories of life in Sutton; from ice skating on the Hundered foot Drain down at Sutton Gault to the day the Sutton Tandoori came to town, from milking the cows sat on a one legged stool to duck races, inland tides, kakaking on the river, homebaking and how four years of dedication and careful archaeology revealed an ancient burial urn. Many stories recorded and in the process of editing. Tomorrow morning we are off with the big map to join the Sutton Feast Committe for a ‘market stall’ session outside the One Stop Shop, hope to see you there.

P1050505

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Election Day in Sutton

June 5, 2009 at 2:44 pm · Filed under Activities, How we made this, Stories and tagged: ,

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Orlagh canvassing stories

Orlagh and I spent yesterday afternoon outside Sutton Polling Station at the Pavilion where a constant stream of voters entertained us with stories of Sutton in the past and present. We heard talk of Winston Churchill’s uncle, Clement Freud’s first election to Parliament and rumours of Princess Margaret. There were tales of Sutton schoolteachers and flying blackboard rubbers, of lying at the end of the Mepal airfield runway watching the bombers take off and of elusive landlords.

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Our map of Sutton and collected stories

One of the questions we asked was ‘Where do you go in Sutton to meet people?’ The most popular answers were ‘dog walking on the fens’ and ‘the pub’ while the surgery and the bus stop also got mentions. It wasn’t all positive though and several people told us that once your children leave school it can be difficult to meet people and that Sutton can be ‘clique-y’.

There was one moment when two men who stopped by the map to read the stories and tell me about Clement Freud, the old train line and the house they used to live in, discovered that they had been at school together back in the 1940’s! As one of them put it.. “I wouldn’t have recognised you!” For me, it was just great that the Grapevine had restored old connections.

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How to Listen..

May 15, 2009 at 4:48 pm · Filed under How we made this and tagged: , ,

Alice has suggested I write a post on how to set up your computer to listen to the Sutton Grapevine podcasts. It would be a shame if people were missing out on hearing the stories we’ve collected from Sutton folk because they aren’t familiar with the podcast process so here goes..

I’m going to describe how to listen using iTunes. iTunes is available for both Mac and PC. If you don’t have it you can download it for free here www.apple.com/itunes/download/. There are other podcast software available but I haven’t used any of them and I prefer not to recommend them to you without testing them out.

Here’s how to listen to Sutton Grapevine..

If you are using a PC:

- Click on the ‘Podcast’ link at the top of the ‘Listen’ column
- The Podbean website will open.
- On Podbean website click on ‘Add to Itunes’ under ‘Subscribe’ in the right-hand menu
- An alert box appears saying that an external application must be launched.
- Click on Launch Application
- Itunes opens (if you don’t have it installed download it here www.apple.com/itunes/download/)
- The podcast episodes will begin downloading automatically
- You will see the downloaded episodes under ‘Sutton Grapevine’ in Podcasts in the Itunes menu

If you are using a Mac:

- Click on the ‘Podcast’ link at the top of the ‘Listen’ column
- The Podbean website will open.
- On Podbean website click on ‘Add to Itunes’ under ‘Subscribe’ in the right-hand menu
- An alert box appears saying asking you to select an application.
- Select iTunes and click on ‘Choose’
- Itunes opens
- The podcast episodes will begin downloading automatically
- You will see the downloaded episodes under ‘Sutton Grapevine’ in Podcasts in the Itunes menu

And that’s it! It should only take a couple of minutes to set up and then you are ready to listen to the people of Sutton.

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scavenging the grapevine

May 6, 2009 at 2:49 pm · Filed under Contributing Your Story, How we made this and tagged:

A key part of this project is to investigate for ADeC how online media might be useful to rural communities as ‘virtual venues’ (in place of absent cultural spaces) to knit together different activities and help provide a ’shareable’ sense of place and identity. Proboscis has been experimenting with various different processes and technologies around local storytelling, mapping and knowledge sharing for some time (see some of our older projects like Urban Tapestries and the various projects of Social Tapestries). Over the years we found that building and maintaining custom systems for such projects created too many barriers for new users and strains on resources to keep going, so a few years back we began to adopt an approach of ’scavenging’ and knitting together tools, software and approaches that people already use or could easily adopt without having to learn a whole new way of sharing their stories.

Sutton Grapevine draws on this process as we’ve integrated storytelling and news sharing (by email and with the free WordPress blog); radio-like sound recordings (via the free podbean podcasting service, the free AudioBoo podcasting service and the low cost Gabcast telephone-to-MP3 podcasting service); photo sharing (via the Flickr group pool); social connections (via the Facebook Group); news feeds (via Twitter); and (once we locate or create some) video sharing (via YouTube etc). We will also be adding in some of our own inventions like StoryCubes and Diffusion eBooks to make tangible things that can be passed around, as well as the digital media.

Not all of the media we’ve integrated thus far might be the right ones, nor are they exclusive. The key is to find out what media people already use and to build that in too, wherever people want to share it. Please get in touch (stories@suttongrapevine.org) if you have anything to share or to suggest a service you use that we could add in.

Giles.

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