Making History Happen

by Pippa Hennessy, Creative Writing Workshop Leader

I’m spending the day at Nottingham University’s Lakeside Pavilion in the company of some inspirational young people. It’s the Youth Heritage Conference, Make History Happen 2012 , organised by Nottinghamshire Archives and the Nottinghamshire Local History Organisation.

So far we’ve heard from Professor Colin Heywood on When Did Youth Happen?, and I’ve attended a workshop where three exciting projects created by young people were presented. Now it’s nearly the end of the lunchbreak and I’m trying to hammer out a blog post in five minutes flat. Not something I’m very good at, I tend to burble on…

see?

Professor Colin Heywood preparing for his talk as Councillor John Cottee introduces the day

When did Youth Happen?

The question isn’t as easy to answer as you might think. In fact, it isn’t as easy to define as you might think either – what is youth? when does it start? when does it end? I scribbled down a lot of thoughts and ideas, which are far too nebulous to turn into anything coherent. So I’ll just list some of them here:

• Youth is a period of transition from dependence on others to independent adulthood.
• The form that transition takes varies from culture to culture – how long it is expected to last, how much responsibility you have to take, the particular customs and rites you need to follow.
• It starts at puberty – easy to tell for women, but how to define this for young men?
• When does it finish? when you get married? when you move away from home? what about people who ‘never grow up’?
• Recent ideas suggest it’s a process of ‘looking for your identity’, whatever that means. Judging by my boys, it’s partly about distancing yourself from your parents.
• Society (and the state) often protects ‘youth’ from making mistakes – too much protection? too little?
• Youth involves ‘storm and stress’ – GS Hall (1904) saw it as moving from the barbarism of childhood to the civilisation of adulthood. Hmm.
• I wasn’t sure about the idea of the Abbayes de la Jeunesse – groups of young men who maintained the morality of their neighbourhoods. Only happened on the Continent though.

Lots and lots of questions raised, and like much of history, not many answers. Food for thought in my creative writing workshop this afternoon, I think.

Youth Projects Workshop

I was bowled over by the enthusiasm of the young people who presented their projects in this workshop. The first group was four home-schooled kids (Molly, Iona, Athena and Seirian) who’d been researching the green spaces created in Nottingham as a result of the 1854 Nottingham Inclosure Act – as part of the ‘Olympiad Journals’ project. They’d made a film about the information they’d discovered, and had produced a fantastic display and journals of their photos, essays, pictures and maps. This is all now kept at the County Archives and I’d recommend you go and have a look.

Cultural Olympiad Journals project – the McMillans’ journal.

Jenny came next – she said she was very nervous, but her talk was fascinating – about a trail she’d created around Brinsley, an old mining village near Eastwood. She knew so much about the history of the area, she was able to add information to a tour guide’s spiel on an open day at the Brinsley national heritage site. The story of the Brinsley headstocks alone was fascinating – since the mine closed they’ve been taken all over the place – to Retford, back to Brinsley, to Chesterfield, back to Brinsley again… and at some point along the way they shrank a couple of feet, because they were set in concrete and had to be sawn off at the bottom to be moved.

Finally (and I must apologise, I didn’t get their names), two young ladies talked about the Illuminate project which is run by the Nottingham Museums Young Arts group. They’ve worked on an exhibition of silks at Nottingham Castle, with many associated events and activities, supported by professional specialists. I’m definitely going to check out their work.