The Oswestry Model

Oswestry Heritage Comics – Heritage Open Days, 2016. Click for a larger image.

At the Oswestry Town Museum’s Christmas party this year, it was announced that the town had received a number of accolades for the way in which it participated in Heritage Open Days. In particular, national organisers were impressed with the range, variety and inventiveness of events and activities which took place – a range and variety that far surpassed many other towns with more “impressive” heritage. One of the things that got a mention was my own Oswestry Heritage Comics series, published throughout this past summer in the Oswestry Advertizer.

Oswestry’s approach to Heritage Open Days has always been characterised by a very strong volunteer ethic. Hundreds of people help out at excavations, lead local history walks, put on re-enactment events and staff museums, visitors centres and attractions. This ensures that even small, inaccessible and off-the-beaten-track venues can be part of the event. Oswestry’s local heritage community – rather than it’s local heritage industry – makes it’s Heritage Open Days special and worth marking in the calendar.

Designing Heritage Open Days events around this strong volunteer ethic, and bringing the people behind the heritage firmly into focus has been called “The Oswestry Model”, and it’s something I’m pleased the Oswestry Heritage Comics have been part of. As I now start to talk with people about what I might do next with the Oswestry Heritage Comics, I want to make sure this people-centred approach continues. Comics can do a very good job of getting people – literally – into the picture. For local history, archaeology and heritage, this means showing how the research, preservation and interpretation of local heritage depends on the willingness of local people to get involved. Next year, I’m really hoping that we can develop the Oswestry Heritage Comics a bit further by incorporating local history workshops into the production of the comics, so that they don’t just tell people what’s important about their heritage – but they reflect the community’s sense of what’s important, too.

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Art, Archaeology and Community

My Gillray-inspired political cartoons about Old Oswestry have been part of an exhibition of art inspired by the iron age hillfort put on by the Artists Hugging the Hillfort group. The exhibition has been at The Willow Gallery in Oswestry, and is now at Blossoms Gallery in Aberystwyth all through June.

As part of the exhibition opening at The Willow, I gave a short talk about the connections between art and archaeology. The response from the audience was really interesting. Most people attending the talk were completely unaware that there were any connections between archaeology and art – but most were also immediately enthusiastic about the possibilities and potentials of those connections.

For archaeologists, connections with art are opportunities to explore relationships between past material culture and the wider social and cultural meanings of ancient landscape, environment and ecology. But for local communities, connections between art and archaeology are opportunities to help express intimate, contemporary relationships between people and place.

This exhibition brought home to me how much the connections between art and archaeology have to offer those who often feel powerless in the battle to preserve and protect their local heritage. Art about archaeology gives members of a community the chance to show the lived importance of their historical, ancient and ecological heritage – to politicians, to developers, to friends and neighbours… even to archaeologists.

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