Following on from a previous post giving an overview of the Ouse Washes Landscape Partnership’s 25 projects which the OWLP partnership aims to deliver between now and 2017, we can now also proudly present our Landscape Conservation Action Plan!

The Landscape Conservation Plan (or LCAP) is the Ouse Washes LP partnership’s main document that was sent to the Heritage Lottery Fund, together with other paperwork for our stage 2 grant submission, back in November 2013; in short, it contains:

• A summary of the varied heritage of the OWLP landscape, explaining what is important and why;
• An overview of the issues facing the landscape, its heritage and its communities, together with an outline of the opportunities to address these issues;
• A detailed understanding of how the OWLP scheme will be addressing the needs of the landscape and communities, together with details of the projects it will carry out in order to do so…

At Gressenhall we have over 50,000 objects. From trinkets to tractors, each one of these objects has a past, a present and, if we do our job well, a future. To look after these objects we need to know what they are and where they are. Put simply this is ‘collections management’ but what does that really entail?

Imagine for a moment if you will standing in the queue at Argos. You’re after a kettle. You would like a colour to match your kitchen and you know that it needs to be small enough to fit under your taps.

Luckily, Argos have an extensive catalogue that you can flip through to find just the thing you are looking for. The description gives you its measurements, a photograph and the code you need to purchase it. Importantly, Argos also know where it is and how to get it to you.

The…

with my kids home for summer vacation, we’ve turned to making crafts in the art studio. i decoupaged the cages & the sign onto an ugly birdhouse. i do have instructions for doing so…in this blog (i think the post is titled 2me4art project birdhouses). the Birmingham Museum of Art’s gift shops bags are clear with just the name of the museum, an easy thing to cut up & use to decorate the bird house. this birdhouse is located beside my deck. easily within view of any upcoming residents.

Photo Credit: Joint Staff Public Affairs via CC Flickr

I recently read an article written by Kim Willsher on TheGuardian,com in which she told many stories of servicemen that participated in D-Day and World War 2. I thought that it would be a great share with all of you. I hope that you would take the time to remember these people and the things that they experienced during this awful time of war.

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They stood to attention as straight as their creaking backs would allow and saluted briskly as a lone bugler high up on the old Pegasus Bridge played the Last Post. A minute’s silence followed; the men bowed their heads, dabbed their eyes and remembered the fallen.

Some made one last heroic effort to rise from their wheelchairs, others leaned on sticks or the arms of relatives and friends. Medals glinted in the morning sunshine; rows and…

Yesterday’s World Environment Day, the United Nations’ principal vehicle for encouraging worldwide awareness and action for the environment, focused on tackling climate change. This year’s theme is Raise your voice, not the sea level. First established in 1972, every year on 5^th June countries around the world host seminars, events and environmental projects from cleaning up Kosovo to solar electric roofs in Barbados to plastic purges on the beaches of Sri Lanka. And there are the WED challenges.

This year is also the UN International Year of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and part of the activities of WED were to raise awareness about the challenges SIDS face, their vulnerability to climate change and sea level rise and the urgent need to help protect the islands.

The message of WED is that our individual actions will aggregate into collective action with the power to transform, in this…

If a single estate can be taken to encapsulate the social, political and planning history of council housing in this country it is probably Knowle West in Bristol.  You’ll find in it all the hopes and dreams, all the good intentions and unintended consequences, that have marked the complex story of council housing over the last hundred years or so.  And you’ll find families and communities that have lived this story in all its complexity.

Broad Walk, Knowle © Phil Jaggery and made available under a Creative Commons licence

To begin with, let’s cast our eyes a little wider.  In the interwar period, the Bedminster and Knowle Estate was the largest of Bristol’s interwar council schemes.  Building began in 1920. By 1939 the estate as a whole comprised over 6000 council homes and a population of some 28,000.

As we saw in last week’s post, this was the product of three…