Crafting the Past - Participate

Crafting the Past

Partners and Supporters

We are working with organisations and individuals who are interested in promoting better understanding, a strategic approach, and a better-resourced and better-connected presentation of Sheffield’s heritage.

Sheffield's deindustrialised context provides opportunities for innovative approaches to build diverse relationships with the city's industrial heritage and explore connections with memory and place-making. These approaches can shape the current Heritage Strategy for Sheffield (2021-2031), adopted by Sheffield City Council (SCC), the first grass-roots, community-led strategy in the UK, aiming to celebrate and promote heritage diversity, recognising its educational, social, well-being, and environmental benefits. This research is timely because living memory of industrial cultural legacies and their social impacts is short and its value has only recently been recognised.

The project provides community members with tools for creative expressions of their history and heritage. It also explores diversity's impact on experiences with industrial heritage , assess the impacts of dominant historical narratives on civic engagement with industrial heritage and generate community-led narratives about Sheffield's industrial heritage.

About the Partners and Supporters

Joined Up Heritage Sheffield (JUHS)

JUHS is a main partner in Crafting the Past project supporting with dissemination and community involvement.

Joined Up Heritage Sheffield has ensured collaboration among organisations and individuals interested in heritage; promoting understanding, encouraging a strategic approach and developing a better-resourced and better-connected presentation of heritage. It offers opportunities for effective networking between individuals, local community heritage groups and other relevant organisations and initiatives. This project identifies with the Heritage Strategy for Sheffield which is a ten-year Action Plan designed to lead the city to a position where it will understand and celebrate its heritage better.

Kelham Island Museum

Kelham Island Museum is one of the venues for the workshop and it is helping in creating public awareness for the project.

Kelham Island is an industrial museum alongside the River Don in the centre of Sheffield. The island was subsequently named after the Town Armourer, Kellam Homer, who owned a grinding workshop on the neighbouring goit (mill race) in 1637. The museum houses exhibitions on science and Sheffield industry. This includes the reconstruction of little mesters' workshops and and England's largest surviving Bessemer converter which is an industrial process for the mass production of steel from molten pig iron before the development of the open hearth furnace.

Portland Works

Portland Works is one of the workshop venues for Crafting the Past project.

Portland Works is a community benefit society of traditional and modern craftspeople located within one of the UK’s most important historical industrial buildings. Often referred to as the birthplace of stainless steel manufacturing, Portland Works was built in Sheffield in 1879 and is now one of the last remaining working examples of a purpose built metal trades factory. Following a half-century of neglect, the building was purchased in 2013 by a social enterprise comprising more than 500 community shareholders who, having saved it from residential conversion, are now undertaking an extensive renovation.

Walkley Community Centre

The centre hosts one of the workshops for Crafting the Past project.

A beautiful Edwardian building, Walkley Community Centre, was established in 1909 with the aim of promoting and advancing the availability of education and in the interests of social welfare to provide facilities for recreation and leisure time occupation in order to improve the quality of life and for the benefit of the inhabitants of the Walkley area without distinction of sex or of political, religious or other opinions, by associating with the local authorities, voluntary organisations and inhabitants in a common effort.

DePOT

Historical roots and lived experience of deindustrialisation

Deindustrialization and the Politics of our Time (DEPOT) is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada-funded partnership project consisting of 33 partner organizations and 24 co-applicants and collaborators from six countries in Western Europe (Italy, France, Germany and the United Kingdom) and North America (Canada, United States). The partnership examines the historical roots and lived experience of deindustrialization as well as the political responses to it. The overall goal is to understand deindustrialization in transnational and comparative perspective, its causes, the responses to it, its effects, and its legacies. It supports Crafting the Past project.

NUDISUR

'Nucleus of Researchers of the South'

Nudisur is an academic network dedicated to the creation, debate and reflection of knowledge around cultural, heritage and territorial issues, for the purpose of impacting positively on the society. From a decolonial perspective, it works at the national and international level, in solidarity and collaboratively, on a project that connects academia and public service with community groups. Through its partnerships, Nudisur envisions construction of inclusive, collaborative and supportive collectivities.

TICCIH

Heritage focused

The International Committee for the Conservation of the Industrial Heritage (TICCIH), the Committee aims to research, investigate, map, catalogue, inventory, disseminate, protect and conserve the tangible and intangible assets of the Brazilian industrial heritage. Members are concerned with developing concrete actions against the destruction/deterioration of our industrial park and the numerous risks that threaten the preservation of this heritage.

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