About This Heritage Education Documentary Film

In 2014 I made this heritage education documentary film for Heritage Skills in Education (HSed), a programme designed by the North of England Civic Trust and funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. The film premiered at that year’s Awards Ceremony, and was the third film I had made for the Trust. HSed was built to get young people interested in traditional building skills and conservation careers, and my job was to follow that learning as it happened, in workshops and on site, rather than simply summarising the programme afterwards.

Heritage is People as Much as Place

I wanted this heritage education documentary film to be more than a record of activities and workshops. Heritage, as the participants kept reminding me, is as much about people as it is about buildings.

“It’s the stories behind the buildings. It’s the continuity of our identity as a group of people, and it’s something we should protect and look after, for ourselves and for the future.”

That idea shaped how I filmed HSed throughout, looking for the people behind the brick and stone rather than the brick and stone itself. Students worked directly with real buildings, including the Masonic Hall in Bedlington and Cosin’s Library in Durham, proposing new uses ranging from an ice rink to a community cafe. As one student put it:

“We had to take old historic buildings and make them more modern, to try and update history without trying to take out history.”

Skills Passed Down, Stories Carried Forward

Filming in the workshops was the part of this project I enjoyed most. The footage follows students shaping stone, carving timber, designing stained glass and mapping out building plans, many of them realising, as one put it, that they “didn’t realise how difficult it was until they tried it.” Alongside the traditional crafts, students were also building digital models in Google SketchUp to visualise how the buildings they were studying might be reused, so the film sits somewhere between old skills and new tools rather than treating them as opposites.

One craftsman in the film talks about what it means to work on a building across centuries:

“I take roofs off that have been put on a hundred, two hundred, three hundred years ago. I see people’s names etched in, and I’m doing the same work, the same way that they did it three, four hundred years ago. It’s just fascinating.”

Another participant reflects on what that continuity gives a building:

“There’s a love that’s gone into old buildings. It creates this soul to a place.”

Real-World Learning

HSed was more than a classroom exercise, and that is what this heritage education documentary film set out to show. An evaluation report commissioned by the Trust recorded participants’ understanding of heritage rising from an average score of 4.1 before the programme to 8.18 afterwards, and teachers spoke about the programme reaching students who had not engaged as readily with more conventional lessons. One sequence in the film follows a young man who, after a stonemasonry workshop, went on to an apprenticeship with Heritage Consolidation, a fairly direct example of a workshop leading somewhere real. Another participant summed up the shift in outlook simply:

“Before I thought that historic buildings were boring, but now I see that they can be very interesting.”

A Heritage of Collaboration

HSed brought together students, craftspeople, architects, heritage professionals and educators, from school pupils trying stained glass for the first time to university students drafting Conservation Management Plans. Watching the finished film at the Awards Ceremony, surrounded by the people who appeared in it, was one of the better moments of making it. It felt less like screening a film and more like handing something back to the people it was about.