Uncovering Hidden Histories: Sharing the Dockyard Story through Lived Experience
Uncovering Hidden Histories: Sharing the Dockyard Story through Lived Experience
As part of the upcoming Volunteers Week 2025, our Public Engagement Officer highlights community partner projects that our volunteers have actively engaged with, bringing the Dockyard to life for a different audience.
Wordsmithery: Dockyard Hidden Words
As part of the recent UKSPF-funded Medway River Lit Rippling Out project, we partnered with Medway-based literacy CIC Wordsmithery to engage members of the local community in a workshop inspired by hidden words, letters and symbols found around the Dockyard.
On a sunny Saturday in March, two of our ships’ volunteers, who both apprenticed and worked at the Dockyard, led an amazing tour for this group of local creatives. Both volunteers have been instrumental in developing our brilliant Dockyard Mateys tour, and they adapted this content specifically for the group, having worked closely with the team from Wordsmithery on the preparations, making sure the group got the most out of their time on site.
The volunteers highlighted hidden areas of the Dockyard, weaving in their memories of their time in the ‘yard. They were fascinated by the creative responses from the group and ensured them extra time to explore areas in more detail, take photographs and rubbings of letter forms, patterns and textures.
The group were so engrossed in the tour that they had to hurry back to start the next part of the workshop – making artbooks with local printmaker Heather Haythornthwaite, and Sam Hall from Wordsmithery.
They would happily have spent the whole day with our volunteers as they loved hearing their stories. In fact, the volunteers went above and beyond, staying to offer further Dockyard insights and, along with our Public Engagement Officer, offering to take the group back to certain areas to gather further material for their artbooks.
These Dockyard-inspired art books formed part of the Wordsmithery community exhibition hosted in The Namur Room later that month.
Electric Medway: Intra Stories
Our volunteers have also recently been involved in an Arts Council-funded project, led by one of our established community partners, Electric Medway, exploring the entertainment history of Intra and the surrounding areas (including the Dockyard).
Part of the project involved young people gaining experience in conducting oral history interviews and interacting with archive material. A small group of our volunteers responded to a community call-out for participants to share their Medway memories.
The volunteers, supported by our Public Engagement Officer, attended sessions in February and April at Sun Pier House, as part of Young Hacks Digital Camps, where they were interviewed by a group of young people, sharing their stories – including working at the Dockyard, their memories of Chatham and Intra high street, theatre visits, amateur dramatics and involvement in dance schools – including dancing on stage at Medway theatres.
As part of the workshop, young people received training on oral history techniques, which they had the chance to put into practice when interviewing our volunteers. They did an amazing job engaging the young people throughout and even shared material from their own personal archives relating to their memories. Young people also had the chance to engage directly with a selection of our archive material, relating to the Dockyard amateur dramatics group, Meddolarks.
The material gathered for this project will form part of a digital medway-based entertainment archive and physical installations along Intra High Street. We are really looking forward to following the developments and seeing how our volunteers’ contribution has helped shape the project.
For both projects, it was wonderful to see the volunteers engaging in this way, sharing the Dockyard story through their lived experience, and everyone involved got so much out of the experience. Here’s to future community partner collaborations – we can’t wait to see what’s next.
