Little Manhattan
Digital Drama has been awarded a grant by the National Lottery Heritage Fund to celebrate Croydon’s magnificent skyline and capture the memories of those who lived through the regeneration of the town’s urban environment after the 1950s.
Digital Drama has been awarded a grant by the National Lottery Heritage Fund for an exciting heritage project, Little Manhattan, in the London Borough of Croydon. Made possible by money raised by National Lottery players, the project will capture and preserve stories from the local community focusing on the area’s urban landscape and in particular, the skyline that rose above the town in the post-war period between the 1950s and 1970s. This regenerative building boom transformed Croydon from being a town made up of traditional brick buildings to an architecturally modern urban space rivalling the design, skyline and environment of major cities, earning it the nickname ‘Little Manhattan’.
Digital Drama, supported by project partners Croydon Council’s Archive, Museum and Library Services, will run a year-long series of community activities and events starting in April 2023 to record and preserve local residents’ memories of the redevelopment of Croydon. Stories of some of the town’s distinctive brutalist high-rises and flyover will feature in the creation of a free audio trail, celebrating the local urban environment, as well as a new short film using little-seen archive footage of the area and an artistic representation of Croydon’s skyline made by families and young people in a series of community craft workshops over the year.
Digital skills workshops will train young people from local communities and enable them to gain experience in interviewing, audio recording and editing for digital content creation. Working with heritage professionals from Croydon Council’s Archive, Museum and Library Services, participants will gain a deeper insight into this previously under-researched part of their urban landscape and learn valuable new communication skills to use as they develop their careers.
We will host free family craft sessions at the Museum of Croydon and Croydon Archives in the summer holidays to create the Little Manhattan skyline installation, and after a three-month tour to local libraries in the borough, featuring accompanying heritage talks and reminiscence sessions, the project will culminate in an exhibition at the Museum of Croydon in January 2024.
The Little Manhattan team will reach out to older people in communities to capture memories which are at risk of being forgotten.
For more information visit: www.digitaldrama.org/project/little-manhattan/
Images courtesy of Croydon Archives:
1. PH-X-185, Park Lane
2. PH-X_184, Park Lane towards Fairfield
3. PH-04-5819 NLA Tower
4. Prefix beams over High Street Flyover, 1967
Call to Action:
Do you remember the regeneration of Croydon between the 1950s and 1970s? Digital Drama would like to record your memories as part of the Little Manhattan project to be used as part of an audio trail and short film as well as being preserved with other oral histories in the Museum’s Collection. If you have a memory or story to share about the rebuilding of Croydon, please contact Digital Drama via email info@digitaldrama.org.
Quotes:
Commenting on the award, Borough Archivist Rosie Vizor said:
“We are delighted to be partnering with Digital Drama on the ‘Little Manhattan’ project, which has been awarded a grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund. This project will capture, explore and share stories about Croydon’s urban landscape re-developing dramatically following the destruction of World War Two.
Croydon transformed from being comprised of mainly Victorian structures, to an architecturally modern urban space to rival the design of major cities, leading to its nickname ‘Little Manhattan’. This innovation went hand in hand with the changing diversity of communities settling in Croydon, with a vision of starting a new life, rising out of the ashes of war.
The funding will allow us to both capture new stories of those who witnessed this change and digitise our at-risk existing oral histories on the topic. We’ll use the Archive and Local History Collections to create an architectural walking tour of Croydon and will invite the community to reflect on Croydon’s urban landscape, sharing the resulting creative and research outputs through exhibitions.”
Kate Valentine of Digital Drama adds:
“We are thrilled to have received this support thanks to National Lottery players and are confident the project will bring together people across the borough to celebrate the rich diversity of Croydon’s architectural heritage.”
