Just helping to promote this event, taking place in Newport Museum later this week
‘Making Chartist Banners’ Thursday 19th June 10.00 – 14.30 at Newport Museum & Art Gallery FREE WORKSHOP – sponsored by NIACE ‘Adult Learners Week’ led by Christabel Gilbert - regional co-ordinator of the Quilters Guild Get ideas to design your own community/school Chartist Banner Have a go! Try some of the techniques See how Christabel is ‘re-creating’ the Newport Banner (1841) Learn the techniques she is using Find out how the needle workers of 1841 tackled the task - What materials? Colours? - What kind of Lettering? Images? Who, What and When were the Chartists? Find out about Chartist visual culture A limited number of places are available Apply at Museum Reception Desk or CONTACT: [email protected] Tel: 029 20613359 IT’s FREE!!
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The Chartists Live twitter feed continues to grow on a daily basis. In the last week, the second Devizes riot has just occurred, leaving some of the more prominent Chartists physically battered, and literally chased out of the town. Meanwhile, a new article has just gone live on the Journal of Victorian Culture Online, which introduces the Chartists Live project, and provides some historical contextualization for the live historical tweets that are being posted on a daily basis. The paragraph below contains the introduction to the article, with the rest of the text available at the Journal of Victorian Culture Online: 'Politics is boring, we are often told. Every party, apart from the colour of their rosettes, seems to offer pretty much the same thing when it comes to policy and personality. So disconnected are voters with the modern breed of candidates, that in recent decades, some 30 percent of the electorate have seemingly disenfranchised themselves by just not bothering to vote at all, and that’s on a good day. Yet, 175 years ago, on November 4th, people fought and died for that very opportunity. The candidates may have been disliked no less than they are today, perhaps more so, but the right to have a say was something that thousands would knowingly risk their lives for. Debate over the relative success of the Chartist movement continues, but success or failure, it retains a striking legacy that remains a potent symbol for political reformers today.' This week has seen the launch of our new project – Chartist Live 2014. As projects go, the inception of this one was perhaps a touch unusual. Walking, on route to the National Museum, a couple of weeks ago, I bumped into Les James, pioneer of many of the very good things to have been developed of late which explore Chartist heritage. A sprawling conversation, which touched at length once more on the sad demise of archaeology in the National Museum Wales organisation, eventually – perhaps inevitably if you know Les – got onto the subject of the Chartist anniversary celebrations. It was from there that we discussed the range of promotional possibilities for the celebrations, and I was surprised to learn that nothing had been developed for twitter. From that point, there was no looking back. Having mentioned twitter, Les asked if I would be happy developing something on this front and, with my partners in Cyfarwydd (more on that next month), @ChartistsLive was born. There is no shortage of excellent examples of the use of twitter in association with heritage themed events, and I have no shame in saying that this concept very much follows on the back of the tremendously successful @RealTimeWWII feed. With some 300k followers, the World War II themed feed has really highlighted the way in which these ‘as live’ period specific feeds can engage audiences. The scope for @ChartistsLive is of course somewhat narrower in comparison, but we should not forget that the Chartist story has a very wide reach. Followers are already being attracted from Australia, which has some obvious Chartist connections, while core followers in Canada highlight the reach of a Welsh story to expat communities. Covering the events building up to that fateful day in November 1839, @ChartistsLive develops a day by day narrative, following the main players in the Chartist campaign. Henry Vincent and John Frost will feature prominently, largely because their actions are so well documented, in the case of Vincent, by himself. However the Chartist story was a headline grabber in its day, so we can make liberal use of print media from 1839 as well. All of this will help create, what I hope will be, quite a holistic overview of 1839 – connecting media commentary, personal reflections and wider social insights on the conditions of the working classes in this tempestuous political period. I’m also developing what might amount to an unhealthy interest in this period as a result, with morning research on the topic having become a steady part of my daily routine. Still, it is all proving to be exceptionally interesting, and early feedback seems pretty positive too. So, here’s looking forward to this project’s development over the coming months – I imagine November is going to be exceptionally busy when it comes to tweeting! Well, it turned out to be quite a year for heritage in Wales. While there were occasions which provided cause for great optimism, there was a steady stream of reminders to highlight just how vulnerable our national heritage resource actually is. The sad truth of 2013 however, is that the real negative impacts will not truly reveal themselves until deep into 2014, if not later, as the creeping tendrils of fiscal cuts continue to slowly erode the foundations of museums and heritage organisations in Wales and beyond. Surely the most controversial moment of the year though had to be the Chartist mural debacle. I’ve promised myself on more than one occasion that I would just let the mural story go, but every once in a while we receive little reminders as to why the mural destruction was so symbolic. When Newport city council battered their way through with plans to obliterate the distinctive mural, they critically underestimated the sentiment of locals in Newport. Perhaps there were not thousands demonstrating against the council’s actions, but there were certainly hundreds, not to mention the odd Hollywood celeb to add to the mix. The anger regarding the loss of the mural stimulated a debate as to what constitutes heritage. Is a thirty year old wall mounted mural something that is worthy of protection? Is it part of the heritage landscape worth protecting? Opinion in Newport was clearly divided, with the city council making a concerted decision, that being that the mural was indeed not part of the heritage landscape, and certainly not worthy of saving. This though raises other more pressing concerns, namely what comes next? What else could a council decide to cast by the wayside in the name of development and gain? Perhaps our built heritage, in terms of castles for instance, may not seem under any immediate threat, but the heritage sector is in many respects standing on a precipice. Our museums are slowly being stripped down from the inside out, as budget cuts erode staff positions, education programmes and, in places, the very existence of museums in their entirety. Chapel heritage across Wales is gradually vanishing as more and more buildings fall out of use, while proposed developments seem to be encroaching closer and closer on to the edges of hillforts in Wales (not to mention Offa's Dyke), and it is questionable how close new buildings will get to rampart defences before new residents can confidently claim to actually live on top of an Iron Age fort. Sites and staff are threatened in a manner in which we have not experienced for several decades, and it should be an ongoing cause of concern for all in related fields. At the same time, Welsh Government moved ahead with its consultation on the Heritage Bill for Wales. Many will remember a similar white paper being drafted for heritage in the UK several years ago, before it was bumped in the list of priorities for a general election. Whether a similar fate awaits the Welsh Heritage Bill awaits to be seen, but at the very least government in Wales is actively discussing the future framework for heritage in this country, so the field is at least not being forgotten about. However, the poor old Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments for Wales looks set to buy the farm as a result of government involvement, despite almost everyone in public consultation stressing what an incredibly bad idea it would be to merge the RCAHMW and Cadw. While government is certainly focusing on heritage in Wales, the consequences may most clearly be manifest in the loss of another significant organisation. While the RCAHMW remains threatened, the archaeological trusts are fighting their corner, and the Archwilio application, developed by the four trusts, is a positive reminder both of the scale of the archaeological resources at our disposal in Wales, and the intent in this country to enhance public accessibility to those resources and archives. In this respect, Wales has forged a path as a world leader regarding accessibility. Few other, if indeed any nation, can boast the same level of access to historic environment records as Wales currently does. The next challenge is to make sure people know that they can access this information, and of course encourage potential audiences that this information is worth accessing in the first place, but perhaps that is a battle for 2014. For the moment, we can certainly welcome and celebrate the addition of Archwilio to the likes of the People’s Collection project. The real challenge for 2014 will be one of resilience. Local and national government have collectively lined up the culture sector with a succession of budget cut tipped bullets, and are only too keen to pull the trigger. What fate awaits the Newport medieval ship for instance? This internationally significant artefact is going to be evicted later this year, with no obvious home for it to go to. What happens to the Newport ship will probably serve as the acid test for the position of heritage in Wales for the rest of this decade, for if such an assemblage were to be lost to Wales, it would be an indictment on the attitudes of officials in this country regarding our heritage resource. Should the ship be saved, with an intention to display and develop, in a manner akin to the Mary Rose museum which dominated heritage headlines in 2013, then we might have some reason to be optimistic. That all awaits to be seen though, either way, some very significant decisions regarding the heritage of Wales will take place in 2014, and the ramifications will remain with us for much, much longer. Really quite difficult to know what to make of today. When I woke up, I was full of energy and excitement about the Chartist mural. We were going to be protesting on Saturday, the first thing I’d felt compelled to protest about for years, probably not since my undergraduate days. The fate of the mural was a major theme in my teaching, becoming the topic of conversation in both lectures today; yet little did I know that while I spoke about the possibly outcomes for the mural in the long term, it’s short term, and ultimate fate, was being decided by the blade of a JCB. I received a text message just as my last lecture ended, which prompted me to log into twitter. There I was confronted by an image of the Chartist mural, gouged through the middle, cubes scattered across the underpass floor... They actually did it. One of my earliest memories of the mural was being walked through the images with my parents. My father attempted to explain the significance of the story, but as a child I was probably more scared by the images than anything else. Since then, the mural has always been with me. Every time when passing through Newport, it was there. When I worked with Newport Museum, twice daily I would wander past the mural, and always, always find some new feature tucked away. No more. Everything about the loss of the mural leaves a particularly foul taste in the mouth. For all the positioning and commissioning of reports, most of us never really doubted that Newport City Council only ever had one intention, and that was to demolish. To do it in such an underhand manner as this though was really the last insult of a series of affronts. Random numbers of £600,000 were cited for the removal of the murals – many asked ‘based on what’? We were told the mural could not be removed due to it being fused with the wall behind – as the JCB did its work, that was quickly revealed to be either wrong, or a simple lie. Health and safety was cited as to why the mural had to be torn down – yet if the building was so tremendously dangerous, why rumble around with JCBs beneath said unstable structure, smashing into the walls? If you were to take everything the council came out with on face value, you could only be confused by their course of action. Yet, deeply cynical and hurt views are the ones that remain, and trust for the body responsible will not be readily forthcoming anytime soon. But for all the accusations and recriminations (of which there must be, at the ballot box if nowhere else), first and foremost this is a very, very sad day. A part of the cultural landscape of Newport is no more. With the best will in the world, there was not a great deal of that cultural landscape left to preserve in the first place. The Chartist mural now joins either end of the Newport ship, the beautiful Lyceum Theatre (along with most of Newport’s late 18th and early 19th century architecture) and the bulk of Newport Castle, as one more lost legacy, one more part of Newport heritage to be chipped away and sent to oblivion. Angry, yes; shocked, certainly; saddened, above all things. |
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