The working life of Museum of London

Day 5 (the last day)

For the final day of the project everyone was hard at work editing their interviews. The group did brilliantly editing 15 minute interviews into 5 minutes or less in just a few hours. At the end of a long afternoon we listened back to some of them. They were fantastic and really opened up some of the personal stories behind these Riots. 

 What next?

The interviews are currently being transcribed and the many photographs sorted. We’ll then be uploading the audio, transcriptions and photographs to our main Museum website, so watch this space! 

See more of the photos from the project here.

This blog has been written by participants of a social media reporting project.

Day 4

It’s the day of the interviews and we’re all prepared.  Some of us are up and out interviewing on the streets of Brixton on the front line reliving the experience of the 1981 riots.

A few of us admitted to feeling nervous, but speaking to the interviewees prior to the interviews really helped to calm the nerves and provided valuable information for the main interviews.

Our official photographer Frewine Solomon was joined by another photographer from Time Out magazine who took pictures of us in action, and some of us were interviewed – it’ll be interesting what they say about us!

After doing our interviews we sat quietly and did our logging – hopefully this will help us with the editing process.

See photos from the project here.

This blog has been written by participants involved in a social media reporting project.

Day 3 

A journalist from The Guardian came down to the workshop to find out more about the project and interviewed us about what we were doing. She seemed interested in the project and wanted to find out more about us.

The last day to prepare for our interviews, we have been given a list of interviewees.  We discussed what questions to ask, how we wanted to present our interviews and were given the interviewees contact details to introduce ourselves.

We learnt how to edit using Audacity a free programme we downloaded off the internet. It was a good eye opener into world of editing. Our telephone conversation with the interviewees was really useful for gaining background information for the interviews. We ended the day presenting our interview plan to the group.

See photographs from the project here.

This blog has been written by participants involved in a Social Media reporting project. 

Day 2

We learned about the social media tools we could use to broadcast our own stories and opinions on certain matters using the internet, using websites called Flickr, Youtube and Wordpress.  Then we had to create our strategies on how to present our interviews: thinking about what questions to ask, and whether to add pictures or sound effects.  After we had done that we interviewed two Museum of London staff members: Paul Clifford and Martin Kaufman, who were living in and around Brixton at the time of the riots, about what they remembered from the time.  We learnt that interviewing isn’t just reading questions from a piece of paper, but rather listening to the answers given by the interviewee and building further questions from that.  It was harder than we thought.

This blog is written by participants of a one week social reporting project.

Day 1

This is a project run by the Museum of London,  to bring the story of the Brixton riots in 1981 to life.  We will be interviewing people from the Brixton area of that time.   We are a group of Londoners,  given the chance to learn reporting and interviewing skills,  with the help of sounddelivery.  We weren’t around at the time of the riots, but we want to learn more.  We started the day with a bit of history from a community historian Angelina Osborne  dating back to the 16th century up to the date of the riots in  April 1981. We learned the key factors that lead to the riot like racism, anger, housing, unemployment and the introduction of the sus laws which gave the police power to target the people of the Brixton area . We ended the afternoon with sounddelivery training us on the equipment and showing  the different techniques of reporting and interviewing.

We recorded our thoughts of Brixton on our first day, as part of the training. 

My Brixton - First ever interviews by the participants of the project

Click here to see photographs from the first day of the project!

Late:Create is an exciting monthly workshop where members get creative using our collections for inspiration. 

This month artist Emily Candela worked with the group to create a huge temporary sculpture inspired by the Museum of London’s 1559 painting, Nimrod supervising the construction of the Tower of Babel by Martin Van Valckenborgh.

Liam, a member of the group explains how the sculpture was made:

‘This months Late:Create was sculpture. The inspiration was a building called the Tower of Babel. Instead of copying it from a picture we covered it in all kinds of materials so it symbolises the building giving it a new artistic look. I hope you can see the resemblance!’

Late: Create is free and takes place 6 – 8pm on the 1st Thursday of every month and is for people who are currently out of work.  Future workshops include creative writing and sculpture.  The sessions are coordinated by the Museum’s Inclusion Officer, Lucie Fitton. To find out more contact community@museumoflondon.org.uk  

Late:Create is an exciting monthly workshop where members get creative using our collections for inspiration. 

The workshop was lead by poet Meryl Pugh, and here, our regular blogger Liam, tells us more:

‘This months Late:Create was poetry. We were taught that there are different ways of writing poetry – some rhyme and some don’t. We learnt how about consonance, which means using similar sounds in words.  For example, bored and board. We also talked about assonance, which means using the same sounds such as ‘ard’ in lard and hard.
 
Next we started writing. We each had an object from the museum and had to describe its features, what it was used for and who used it. We went into the galleried to collect this information. Next we were ready to write a poem. Meryl helped us by writing the first word or two of each sentence and we filled in the rest using the ideas and words we had gathered.’

Late: Create is free and takes place 6 – 8pm on the 1st Thursday of every month and is for people who are currently out of work. Future workshops include sculpture and hat-making. The sessions are coordinated by the Museum’s Inclusion Officer, Lucie Fitton. To find out more contact community@museumoflondon.org.uk

Late:Create is an exciting monthly workshop where members get creative using our collections for inspiration.   

Photographer Fil Gierlinski lead August’s Late:Create session, and the group learned how to create that perfect picture. 

Our regular blogger, Liam, tells us more:

‘This month’s Late:Create was photography. Fil, the photographer, showed us how a picture captures the texture and shape of an object. When learnt how to take pictures close up using the camera’s macro setting. We paired up and went outside taking close-ups of anything we could find. We took photos of walls, railings, pavements, stairs and anything with an unusual surface. We produced some eye-catching images. We then took the cameras into the museum galleries and from different angles captured an object that would tell us a story about it - its shape - its texture - and what it was. Finally we watched a slideshow of everyone’s work.’

See more photos of the workshop here!

Late: Create is free and takes place 6 – 8pm on the 1^st Thursday of every month and is for people who are currently out of work.  Future workshops include creative writing and sculpture.  The sessions are coordinated by the Museum’s Inclusion Officer, Lucie Fitton. To find out more contact community@museumoflondon.org.uk  

Late:Create is an exciting monthly workshop where members get creative using our collections for inspiration.

Writer Rachel Warrington lead July’s Late:Create session and a group of budding scribes were born.

A group member, Liam, tells us more:

‘This month’s activity was creative writing, lead by Rachel who gave us some simple tasks to get us started. We jotted down answers to questions about our journey to the Museum, such as what we did before we arrived and what we thought at the time.  We turned these answers into a poem and then turned the poem into an artist’s book using old maps of London as covers.

Next we each chose a painting from the collection and picked a person out of the image. We wrote down the thoughts of that person regarding what’s going on around them. After that we jotted down what we know about the picture and tried to relate own experiences to those in the picture.  We combined what we thought the person was thinking and our own perception of the picture to create sentences together to give us a poem or story.’

Poems will be posted here soon!

See more photos from the workshop here.

Late: Create is free and takes place 6 – 8pm on the 1st Thursday of every month and is for people who are currently out of work.  Future workshops include creative writing and photography.  The sessions are coordinated by the Museum’s Inclusion Officer, Lucie Fitton. To find out more contact community@museumoflondon.org.uk

On Thursday 5th June we held our first Late:Create workshop, an exciting creative session for participants to use our collections as inspiration for mini-masterpieces . Each month we work with a different artist, and this month 15 Londoners worked with artist Tunde Akkiniranye to create ceramic African masks. We looked at the bronze Yoruba busts in Museum in Docklands London Sugar & Slavery exhibition for ideas. You can see the Yoruba busts here. 

A group member tells us more:

‘The theme was to create African tribal clay masks, with help from Tunde a professional ceramicist. He showed us the techniques like how to make the base and to add the nose, eyes, and lips. After that we were free to add our own patterns and designs.’

This link takes you to more photographs from the workshop.

Late: Create is free and takes place 6 – 8pm on the 1st Thursday of every month and is aimed at Londoners who are currently not working. Future workshops include creative writing and photography. The sessions are coordinated by the Museum’s Inclusion Officer, Lucie Fitton. To find out more contact community@museumoflondon.org.uk