Are you going up town? Aye, I might do, I’ll see’s what the weather’s like, later...

Who are the people who populate Preston? Where do they work, how do they play? What do they think about the city they live in, its identity, its people, buildings, and landscape?

Going Up Town, a participatory documentary project by Ruth Heritage for arts organisation They Eat Culture, was commissioned by Lancashire Libraries to bring together personal documentary storytelling, informal learning opportunities, archive and contemporary audio and visual recordings, to create a documentary narrative around city centre Preston – what locals call ‘Up Town’. Working with the North West Sound and Film Archives and filmmaker Christian Krupa, we focussed on work and play in the city centre, looking at the community’s expectations of what a Lancashire city centre is, was, and will be in the future.

Part of the participatory process involved archive screenings and oral history storytelling sessions in spots across the city centre. We invited the general public to come into the indoor market, the outdoor market, the Black Horse pub, the library, the bus station, and Boots the Chemist to join us for the project. We also worked directly with the people who go to the Foxton Centre, a crisis shelter in Avenham. We showed them archive material from the North West Film Archive, including street scenes from Preston in the 1920’s, the arrival of the M6 in the 1950’s, and about Lancashire in the 1970’s. We asked for their stories about the places and spaces they’d seen – and were amazed by some of the responses. What you can see here in print are some anonymous snippets of stories that came out of the workshops, tales of Preston past and present, and everyday goings-on ‘up town’.

Through collecting tales in these spaces across the city, we began to unpick how the fabric of the city is woven together through the diverse people who work and play here. Everybody has their own story to tell about the place they live, they rewrite it in everyday conversation. And because it is real to them doesn’t mean it’s real to someone else. Through placing these stories next to each other, maybe we can construct a wider story of Preston that not only tells us about the place, but also challenges preconceptions about the people who ‘make up’ the new city.

Participatory media projects can take many forms, from training people to engage in citizen journalism online, to handing over the video camera or audio recorder and training participants to edit. One thing that they all have in common, though, is that they are intended to equip people from every walk of life with the ability to represent themselves, and to level the media playing field with which they can engage.

The work we have currently undertaken with Going up Town forms what we hope is the start of a widespread participatory media project which will enable communities and individuals from Preston to tell their stories of life in Preston, and to ensure it finds a home in traditional and online media spaces.

The work and play series of audio and visual documentaries will be circulated through Lancashire Libraries in 2010. Keep in touch with the project and see clips of everyday stories from Preston at www.goinguptown.co.uk (under construction)