R E V I E W A N D A N A L Y S I S 31 A visit from the Architectural Heritage Fund in 2019 to Sunderland’s Hight Street West before the major restoration of 172/5 started in early 2020. like one less complication to just focus on the ‘formal’ histories rather than trying to understand and include the subaltern, difficult, and unexplored ones, but is it? Many of the projects in OpenHeritage, for example the Praga Lab in Warsaw2 and the Jam Factory in Lviv, Ukraine 3 focus explicitly on collecting, revealing, and showcasing invisible and forgotten stories. Stories that were not in the archives but in living and passed-on memory. Stories of residents and factory workers. For the Jam Factory, an oral history and mapping project ‘Tell Your Story’4 helped build engagement and understanding. The Praga Lab team is working on a living memory exhibition 5 to establish links between the history of manufacturing and new ways of working and making. These projects do not just spark awareness, or fill gaps in the ‘formal’ histories. They build connections and explicitly include groups of people whose heritage is often not celebrated – and thus we could argue, not cared for – in formal heritage sites. Ordinary and extraordinary stories, for example of women and/or working class people and/or immigrants, as well as of the processes and practices, such as the jam making in Lviv. In Sunderland we co-organised an exhibition and events around the ‘Rebel Women of Sunderland’ project. 6 A list of local women to celebrate was crowdsourced via social media, and these women’s stories were brought to life through working with local creatives. This trend of people centred heritage is great. We just need to remember who is centred – and who is cared for. Being willing to explore a more multivocal past is the start of telling a wider variety of stories. A next step is to actively find ways to address those other histories, that you may consider difficult or contested, and not just the once that are useful to develop the project. One of the OpenHeritage cases, the Marineterrein (Navy Yard) in Amsterdam,7 is a relevant example here. It is considered a highly innovative project when it comes to public-private area development, with a clear focus on people. However, to highlight the character of the area, there is a focus on its central role in 17th-century shipbuilding, water- Works to 172/5 by the Tyne and Wear Building Preservation Trust approaching completion
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