Story Maps

We’ve been visiting Newhaven Museum and exploring the town as our research turns to Newhaven and the surrounding area. The museum is full of personal stories, and there are strong international links with Newhaven being an important port along the south coast.

We are running a public workshop as part of Look Again – Newhaven Supergraphics Festival. The festival runs for the whole month of June and marks the launch of 17 new artworks installed around the town.

We continue to work with Highdown Gardens as part of their ‘Discover Days’, creative opportunities for families to learn more about the gardens and surrounding countryside. We’ve been running our collaborative painting workshops and we’ve worked with over 100 children and young people.

We’ve shared with them the story of the Midsummer Oak, a tree near Worthing where, on Midsummer’s eve, skeletons are said to rise from its roots and dance until dawn to the sound of their own bones!

Then there’s the story of the eccentric Miller of Highdown Hill, who may have been working with local smuggling gangs.

We also shared the story of the sinking of the Indiana, a cargo ship which sank off the coast of Worthing, spilling its cargo of oranges and lemons on to the beaches of the town.

The Discover Days have become a popular fixture in the school holiday calendar of activities for children and families. They have helped to raise nearly £3000 this year for the Gardens.

In June, we were invited to run a workshop as part of Look Again Newhaven Supergraphics Festival.

We brought the research we had done at the museum to the workshop, and we were also inspired by Ellie Fryer’s folklore and mythology-based mural which we had visited the week before.

We had access to the collection of Hastings Museum and we worked in the Museum building when it was closed to the public, we enjoyed exploring the collection and finding inspiration there.

We started a new partnership, working with service users from Parchment Trust – a disability charity, supporting people in the local area. We also worked with Lifesize CIC a Hastings organisation providing music and arts facilitation for children and young people.

We made stories, poems, music, animation and even some 3D scanning of museum objects.

Made possible by money raised by National Lottery players, Story Maps will see us working in partnership with Worthing, Newhaven and Hastings museums, with support from University of Chichester’s Centre for Folklore and Fairytales.