Patterning Hitchin Lives
This multi-strand intergenerational project encourages participation in the arts.
Clothes for celebration, work and play
Patterning Hitchin Lives is in collaboration with Hitchin Museum and Hitchin Girls’ School and has been generously funded by the Ashley Family Foundation.
The project fosters experiences essential to creating community cohesion and sustainability.
Scope
- The project explores oral history and writing through the medium of clothing.
- Following training, Hitchin Girls’ students have interviewed their school’s alumni and Hitchin community members using the medium of the clothing to examine individual and community identities, memories and narratives.
- Clothing is particularly apt for this project as the personal, corporeal and sensory memories of clothing are always vivid for individuals.
- All participants have written creatively about their clothing and experiences.
- The project uses clothing to develop a collection of cultural memories for the Hitchin community, as well as capturing and understanding the cultural impact of clothing in Hitchin.
Bringing generations together
The Centre for Intergenerational Practice defines intergenerational work as ‘bring[ing] people together in purposeful, mutually beneficial activities which promote greater understanding and respect between generations and contributes to building more cohesive communities… building on the positive resources that the young and old have to offer each other and those around them’.
Patterning Hitchin Lives encourages new ways of thinking about clothing as well as forming socially beneficial collaborative partnerships.
Many collaborative projects bring together the elderly and school students, but few include a mid-age facilitating group of university students.
The inclusion of the university students helps to positively empower school students to progress to university or professions.
The project is organised by:
- Dr Jennifer Young
- Dr Sarah Lloyd
- Ms Mimi Tessier
- Dr Julie Moore
Mr Andrew Green, Senior Research Fellow in History, has provided the oral history training.