About the Film

This neighbourhood documentary film follows Heart of The Hirst, made in partnership with Museums Northumberland to capture the resilience and identity of The Hirst, a neighbourhood in Ashington shaped by more than a century of coal mining. The mines closed long ago, but the rows of pit houses and the bonds between neighbours that grew up around them are still very much part of how the area sees itself.

A Community Facing Real Challenges

I filmed this at a time when The Hirst, like much of Ashington, was dealing with serious social deprivation, alongside the isolation and disconnection that so often comes with it. What stayed with me was how everyone I met, from long-time residents to the volunteers running the hub, held onto a genuine belief in the good in their community, not as wishful thinking but as something they were actively building, one small act at a time.

The Heart of The Hirst

The Heart of The Hirst is a tenant and resident group based on Beatrice Street, run entirely by local volunteers who meet monthly and take on everything from street clean-ups to social events and newsletters. Their aim, as one volunteer put it in the film, is straightforward.

We’ve got people in the hub who are welcoming, who are trying to do things for other people in the community. If they can come to us, we’ll get them in the community and we won’t expect anything from them.

Party in the Park

The group’s flagship event, Party in the Park, turns Hirst Park into a day of stalls, dog shows, bouncy castles and home baking, and it sits at the centre of the film. Seeing people from every part of the neighbourhood, all different ages and backgrounds, turn up and simply enjoy being together was one of the genuinely magical parts of making this neighbourhood documentary film.

It’s almost like a village party. We haven’t got the money, but we can put on a bloody good show.

Working with Mik Critchlow

The film also features the late Mik Critchlow, who had photographed Ashington for over forty years, alongside artists Walker and Bromwich, who worked with more than two hundred local residents on a community procession. Getting to work alongside Mik was one of the real privileges of this project. He was hugely respected, rightly so given the scale and care of his Coal Town archive, yet he carried none of that as any kind of status, he was simply generous, curious and completely at ease with the people he had spent decades photographing. Since his death in 2023, his archive has found a permanent home at Woodhorn Museum, and it means a great deal to have had the chance to film alongside him while he was still telling Ashington’s story himself.

A Changing Ashington

Many of the old pit houses in The Hirst are now privately owned, and new residents have moved in from right across the North East, so the neighbourhood this film was made in has already changed a good deal since. What hasn’t changed is the spirit one organiser described on camera.

Everybody’s been laughing and joking, talking to each other, which is what we want them to do. We’ve all had a nice day. We’ve all got together. That’s how it should be.

Heart of The Hirst remains one of the projects I think about most, a reminder that community documentary work is really about listening and building trust long before the camera comes out. Filming a neighbourhood documentary film like this one meant spending time in the neighbourhood well before any filming started, so that the people on screen were talking to someone they already recognised rather than a stranger with a camera.