Background . . .
Organizers
Volunteers at the Regency Town House
Our interest in promoting local heritage has led us to participate in the UK's Heritage Open Days event since it began in 1994. Heritage Open Days, which is part of the European Heritage Days initiative, is staged over a four day period around the second weekend of September each year. Our current Heritage Open Days event runs under the title of Brighton & Hove Open Door (BHOD). In keeping with the Heritage Open Days ethos, all Brighton & Hove Open Door events are provided free of charge.
The Foundry Street Event
Public exhibition in Foundry Street
Foundry Street is typical of the 19th century streets in Brighton's North Laine area. Although there was a time when the street, along with the rest of the Laine, was scheduled for demolition, it was spared the wrecking ball and now provides homes and work for people across a broad social and economic spectrum.
While most local residents considered Foundry Street to have little architectural or historical merit when compared with Brighton's more celebrated architecture, to us it seemed to provide an ideal location with which to demonstrate that even an apparently ordinary urban street can have an interesting history and be worthy of care and respect.
The Foundry Street Event provided visitors with a brief history of the street, printed onto large display posters, together with smaller posters on each individual house listing the property's past occupants, their ages and occupations. The information was gathered from local street directories and census records by a team of volunteers.
By focusing on history at this intimate level we hoped to engage people, encourage an interest in local heritage and, ultimately, motivate them to become involved in the decisions that impact on Brighton & Hove's architectural legacy.
The Foundry Street Event proved to be a huge success. It raised great interest amongst local people and visitors, it encouraged neighbours to get to know one another, it generated a sense of pride-in-place and it resulted in numerous requests for similar events in other streets.
MyHouseMyStreet
To accommodate these requests, we decided to undertake a number of further 'street history' events ourselves during BHOD 2009 and to assist others to do likewise. At this point we decided that we needed a new name for the event format and, after much discussion among our volunteers, we finally selected 'MyHouseMyStreet' which we hope conveys something of what we are trying to achieve.
This year (2009), the 'MyHouseMyStreet' initiative will focus on a number of Brighton & Hove locations, including:
- Gloucester Road
- Kensington Place
- Pelham Square
- Foundry Street
The event format for each location will be similar to last year, with large posters explaining the history of the street, and smaller ones delivering information about the past occupants of each individual property.
We are developing this website and its online tools to help us and our collaborators to deliver MyHouseMyStreet events and to make the fruits of the research undertaken available to the widest possible audience.
In the long term, we hope that it will be possible for both our own research teams and others to continue developing MyHouseMyStreet events. If many people use this online resource to document the past occupants of their homes and the histories of their streets, the resultant database should come to be of use both to local people and professional historians.
So, our aim is to encourage you to undertake research on your home and street and then to stage your very own MyHouseMyStreet project. Why not browse the information in the Explore section and if you like what you see, Get Involved.
Notes:
All of the information used to assemble MyHouseMyStreet presentations is held in the public domain.
To maintain privacy we do not provide house occupancy date beyond 1975.
For further information relating to these two points see the Get Involved section.
