Hello everyone. This session is about history and the present, and it's about commemoration and the idea of recording and delving into unrecorded histories and alternative histories and widening our understanding of the past and remembering it today. We're very lucky to have Amy Todd now of New Unity, but formally of Layers of London who will tell us about, I Remember Her, a project to document untold stories in London. Hi Amy. Hello Can you please tell us a tiny bit about Remember Her and what it is, how it came about, and how you found people to work on it? I was working for the Layers of London project and we worked on many different projects. Some of them organically came from community groups that we worked with and the needs that they had and the histories they wanted to document. I think it was coming up to International Women's Day. Women's history was on the mind. The Millicent Fawcetts that you've just got unveiled in Parliament Square. It was something that was very topical and I thought based on that and based on some work that the Institute of Historical Research had done previously, where they'd asked for Twitter users to submit women and their stories that maybe aren't told very often. I felt that would be a really good application for the Layers of London project because it's map-based so you can map the stories of women across London and get a visually represented as just another way to use Layers of London as a public history tool. How did you get people to get involved in the project and how should they do it? With layers of London because anyone could add their own histories and stories onto the website. Some people did that of their own accord but a lot of the time work went into trying to help and enable people to use that platform. I was quite used to that point, I'm working with students, researchers, and community group members that wanted to add stories or wanted to help support adding people's stories onto the website. I put a call out for some students. I thought it would be a good project for some students because it was a short-term volunteering project. There wasn't a long-term commitment. They could work remotely and do the research and add on to Layers of London remotely so they didn't have to come into me because I didn't have that much resource to be able to manage volunteers at that point. I just thought it would be a good opportunity for them to get some work experience working in the Heritage sector and it so was a nice way to involve them. I put a call out for some students under volunteer role explaining what the work that they would be doing and I got two people, Josephine and [inaudible] that came back to me about wanting to undertake role. Okay. How did the outcome differ or how did they evolve from the initial concept of it if at all? I think one thing with the project was it was quite small in scope and so it was actually quite achievable to manage what we set out to do. The project had two pumps to it, which was we wanted to research statues that already exist in London and that are attributed to women and their stories. But we also wanted to find out about women that don't have statues and they're not memorialized. Maybe ask the public and research which women aren't memorialized and where we would potentially put a statue if we were going to put a statue up to them. That was reflected in two ways because there was a small exhibition that was at the Institute of Historical Researcher's library and then there was a collection that went on Layers of London too. They were the two kind of outcomes there. Although I guess one outcome as well was the actual research though the volunteers created a database of statues for females in London today. Then they also did a social media campaign asking people for their suggestions. There's also now a database of females waiting to be commemorated. Why do you think it's important to remember the past and record it and discover it? I think there's a lot of reasons. I think when we're talking about women's history, and particularly for me, it's quite important to just share what women have done in the past because one of the things that started off this project too was that the lack of female memorials and statues. That doesn't mean that women haven't had a role to play. It's just that in the historiography, they're not recorded, and through public history, they're not recorded and if you don't engage in historical debate, like most normal people on a daily basis, you're not going to question that because for you that's just the truth, that's historical truth, when that's not the truth. It's challenging that in a way trying to challenge the dominant narrative and say, these people existed and I think for people that are trying to make the world a better place today and changing, are involved with activism for equality and things. It's important to learn that you're not doing this for the first time and that people did it before because I think that the problem is sometimes generations have to re-learn feminism every time, and if you have that, and you know about what happened before, you can build on it, whereas if you don't know about that, you're just starting from scratch every time again. Layering's an important part of the process? I think so, definitely. I think it's about the public engagement side. It's about allowing people to debate historically about things and think about things analytically like that because I don't think in a lot of the daily grind, you don't really do that, and I think it's about showcasing these histories to say, these things did exist. It's just that perhaps certain governments, or people, or ideologies decided that that wasn't something that they wanted to showcase. What do you think the legacy of ''remember her'' is? I think that it was prototype project that can be built on in the future. It might be something that we will always have the collection [inaudible] that's great as always, there's a digital legacy to it. That's accessible and free to access, so there's no barriers to accessing that information which is great. There's opportunity to build on it, and I'd like to think that perhaps what that might do is start a wider conversation about why there is a lack of female memorials, and it might go towards creating some more or it might go towards thinking, well perhaps we don't want statues, we want something else, another way of memorializing someone's life and achievement. I think it doesn't really matter where it goes as long as there's some debate around it, I think what would be nice is for it to be part of the wider engagement. I feel like that project achieved some engagement with the public on Twitter and things. But the exhibition itself was held at the Institute of Historical Research, which is a building that mainly postgraduates, and researchers and academics use. Perhaps the exhibition could be done again somewhere else, that's a bit more public that anyone could go to perhaps in a public space or something like that, that would be good. How relevant do you think a project like ''remember her'' is to current debates? Is there a relevance in exploring and recording the past, in shaping how we do things today? A 100 percent I think especially with this post-truth worlds that we live in, with politics and things like that. I think definitely. I think for me like I said about if you're involved in activism today, it's important to learn from things that happened in the past, that's important. I think having an understanding of what's worked in the past, and what hasn't worked so well, and why that is important for doing things now. I think also, what I mentioned about, it's easy for us to just accept that what happened in the past, happened in the past, and we haven't been told that through a certain historical lens, or a certain person, or way of thinking, and I think that's important to remember because this is something that we're dealing with today, about having to read the news, but read other sources and be analytical with things, and make your own mind up, which I think is a tool that you need to learn, and you have to challenge yourself and go out of your comfort zone, and not always make a quick decision but maybe listen to a few different viewpoints. I think that's something that history offers that can be related to today. Well, what other groups would you like to see commemorated in the way ''remember her'' commemorated female figures in London's history? I think it's up to those groups how they themselves might want to be commemorated because there's lots of projects that happened at the moment. Like there's two competing queer museums that are trying to have those debates too about how they themselves want to be represented, how that community wants to be represented. There's different ways of doing that and people or go into maybe what a more traditional walk in museum with objects and where some people might be happy with a more transient website, oral histories. So I think it depends. I think much like the statues, one line of thought might be, we don't have enough statues to women, so we're going to build statues. Another line of thought might be, well, that's been quite patriarchal way to show who's famous. Just because they've got statutes doesn't mean you're a particularly nice person. Might just meant that they had a lot of money. So, I think that, it gives the opportunity for people to think, well, I don't want that. What should we have? What represents us well? Perhaps having something less permanent is something that those people would prefer. How did you communicate the message of the project after you've done it or even in the process? So we have to think about how it was going be marketed because, it's one thing doing all this work, but then the other part of it is how do you get people to know about it? So we had a social media campaign. Like I mentioned, it was a bit more reactive than proactive than I think it should have been to make a bigger impact. We put up posters around the local area, including inside the building and outside the building, because I think that the printed media is a good way of getting people to notice it. We also used Lays off London had a regular newsletter. So people that were interested in the project and Lays off London, mapping history and Lays of London has quite a wide outreach across the whole of London. I think it was plugged as well within other media streams by our project partners, by the institute, by some of the other partners involved in the project. Why do you think it's important to give a voice to those without voice? I think for me, when you're looking at art history and how it's written down and represented, there are certain people and certain groups and types of people that are always represented, then there's some that get left out, and it doesn't mean that there isn't things that we can't learn from them. It doesn't mean that they were less important. It just might meant that people at the time felt they were less important or they didn't have enough money, so they weren't represented. So I think for me it's about equity and fairness. It's also about if you're wanting to learn about things that happened in the past, you have to look at that holistically rather than just being lazy really and just picking up the top 10 books about the Victorian period that aren't really going to represent, for example, the compulsory education act and how that affected working class children and things like. Thank you. Are there any other comments or other tips, if you have to give a message to people who will look at this more on public history about remembering the past and today, what few words would you say to them? I think I would say, "Don't get too bogged down in having a huge plan. Just, just do." It might just be a really small DIY exhibition. You might have never done one before, but you might just have an idea to think, I live in Lambeth and I want to look at which women are commemorated in Lambeth. Then I might write a letter to a local councilor explaining that there's this fantastic woman who used to live near this park and we should have a memorial to it. That in itself is a public issue project and it doesn't have to be any more sophisticated than that, and that shouldn't scare you off because you feel like you're not tied to an institution or you're not currently researching. I think that everyone can partake in those and people do par taking in them all the time, public history making, but they just don't realize, so don't be scared off and think you have to do something really sophisticated. You don't, just just do it. It's important to just do it, I think. Okay. Thanks a lot. I hope you enjoyed this session on history and the present and the idea of commemoration. I think this is a very good example of something that can also be replicated quite easily, which makes it valuable to groups of different sizes. So thank you, Amy. Thanks.
