Two new exhibitions at the Beacon Centre are shining a light on North Shields as part of the town's year-long 800th anniversary programme. "North Shields Voices" presents six months of oral history with striking photographic portraits, and "Gannin' Shoppin' in Shields" traces the story of shopping from the 20th century to today. North Shields 800 brings a packed calendar of community events, exhibitions and cultural projects, culminating in a grand finale parade.
00:00Two new exhibitions at the Beacon Centre are putting local voices and memories at the heart of North Shield's year-long 800th anniversary programme.
00:08First, North Shield's Voices presents the result of a six-month oral history project led by local charity Remembering the Past.
00:16Volunteers interviewed residents from across the town to capture reflections on life in North Shields today.
00:21The exhibition pairs striking photographic portraits with short recorded excerpts and includes new artwork inspired by the town's 8th century story.
00:31I work at Remembering the Past. We're mostly volunteer-run organisation based at the Linskill Centre and we exist to encourage people to share their stories, histories, memories of their life in North Tyneside with us,
00:45which we put in our community archive and then we share with the wider public through our website, which is rememberingthepast.co.uk.
00:53So, Remembering the Past put together a project called North Shield's Voices and with that we are trying to capture a moment in time, a snapshot of North Shield's in 2025.
01:05It's different for us because normally our work is about talking to people about their memories of the past and although this project has encompassed some of that,
01:12we're actually trying to talk to people about their thoughts and feelings about the town in 2025 and we're hoping that this will be a record for the future that we can look back on say in 20 years or 100 years' time.
01:24Over the past six months, with funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, we have been going out and about interviewing people, recording interviews and then volunteers have been transcribing, editing, uploading them to our websites.
01:39And then we've worked with a local photographer, a documentary photographer called Hazel Plater, who then took pictures of a selection of our interviewees in situ in their favourite place that they talked about in their interviews.
01:53Because we're really keen to find a whole range of residents and represent sort of a genuine picture of North Shield's.
02:00And so we have talked to the youngest, our youngest person is seven, our oldest person is 96 that we interviewed, so a huge range of ages and different experiences, different life experiences.
02:13So on Saturday, the 6th of December, we are opening our next exhibition, which is called Gannon Shopping in Shields.
02:19And that's an exhibition exploring the history and the future of shopping in North Shields.
02:24And that came about because in 2011, Remember in the Past, worked on a partnership project with the North Shields Chamber of Trade, Queen Alexandra College and North Tyneside Live Well to collect memories and archive images all about what shops were like in the past in North Shields.
02:43And we created a lovely exhibition based around that.
02:47And this year we're representing that, but alongside some research, which we've done in partnership with the Flourish project run by Northumbria University.
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