An immersive museum experience of working-class lives

Up flights of stairs, the scent of history hits you first, and perhaps, also, material remains. Miniscule airborne particles of past lives and the detritus of lost livelihoods. Into the dark, footsteps are unsteady as eyes adjust to the indoor scene which instantly feels like entering a faded brown photograph from 100 years ago. There’s an odd dryness to the air here.

As the iris adapts and the space unfolds, the curious and complex tableau begins to become apparent – but only just. The walls are skeletal, diagonal laths of split wood barely clenched with rusty cut nails to studs of roughly sawn timber. Where there was once lime plaster layered with horsehair there is now just the framework that once held together the fabric of working-class life 100 years ago.

This atmospheric space is a precious surviving glimpse into the domestic everyday lives of an almost-forgotten community and in particular, a writer and activist whose key work is celebrated still for its political resonance.

As you look around the darkened rooms, faint glimmers of light reveal fascinating tableau of antique objects and fragments of text which tell stories of lives lived long ago. Sounds filter through, voices from the past and the present. A film can be seen projected onto a screen hidden behind the plaster lathes and a voice intones prose about life and work 100 years ago. Here are many stories – not always interlocking, sometimes weaving through the digital space, sometimes laid out to read in a comic form, in a graphic novel.

Robert Tressell wrote his 1910 novel ‘The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists’ whilst living nearby and working as a painter and decorator across the town. It is thought that the rooms here above a mews were home to numerous families and were also used as a storeroom and workshop by workmen in similar trades to Tressell. He might even have frequented this dark place himself.   

Today, recently discovered behind long-locked doors and boarded up partitions, St Andrew’s Mews is an arts and culture space just off Queen’s Road in Hastings. Bought as an almost derelict building, the upper floors of part of the site have been opened up, room by room, and found to be a fossilised remnant of what life was like for working class families in the town. Walls scoured of plaster but with intact fireplaces, floorboards marked by countless hobnail boots. 

Into this evocative space, MSL Projects mounted a digital arts and heritage project, Tressell’s Children, bringing back to life real memories of working-class experiences in Hastings. Tressell’s Children makes an explicit connection between the famous political novel of 1910 and a key moment in the hard times experienced by many in Thatcher’s Britain from the 1980’s onwards. 

The Community Programme was a 1980s Conservative political device to lower the increasing numbers of unemployed people signing on and draining the apparently limited resources of the state. As the decade drew onwards, cultural and heritage projects were set up funded by the Community Programme and one of these saw a small group of CP participants making interviews with working class women who had lived in Hastings before and after WW2.   

At MSL Projects, Director Margaret Sheehy and team had long known about the Hastings Oral History Project tapes, thanks to the keen memory of library and archive colleagues. The transcripts of the tapes were discovered and found to be a deeply detailed human-scale community history resource.

Researcher and historian Catherine Hirst then led a series of three workshops: one online, one at Hastings Library and one at Hastings Museum with volunteer researchers. Catherine is a museum and arts professional with thirty years of experience of collections, engagement, and arts management.

Reading the transcripts, MSL researchers found out more about the people who made them. They trawled the town’s archives, online ancestry resources and discovered how to effectively research local history. They were able to find living relatives in Hastings who were related to the people who took part in the oral history recordings in the 1980s.

Adam Glen created a digital version of the exhibition. Building upon the digital materials created for Tressell’s Children, he employed a blend of photogrammetry and 3D modelling to create a digital experience which adds more to the physical exhibition. Photogrammetry was used to capture multiple photos of the space from different angles and the resulting images created a detailed 3D model.

Following this, Adam reconstructed the location from multiple scans of utilised objects, rebuilding the walls and roof. Subsequently, he incorporated lights to replicate the exhibition’s ambience faithfully. This meticulous process yielded a high-definition recreation of the location. Accessed now by clicking on a starting screen on the MSL Projects website, digital visitors hear some of the sounds and words created by the creative team introducing the project. Moving around the space online, hotspots invite further clicks into the narrative and standalone pieces by the invited artists can be enjoyed.

The experience of bringing the project to life, welcoming people safely and accessibly into the fascinating space of St. Andrew’s Mews, and then showing them the wealth of artistic and historic content has been an ambitious undertaking. The resulting event was very successful and a repeat showing in December 2023 was equally popular with the community in Hastings.

MSL also produced a VR recreation of the show designed by Cliff Crawford and viewable on the MSL YouTube Channel

Our educational programme 

Local schoolchildren from Hastings Academy were invited to a pilot workshop at the exhibition in November 2023.

Based on the extremely successful pilot programme MSL is offering workshop programmes for schools (pupils and teachers), adult historians and artists:

• a half-day history programme for schools for years 6-9 for Summer and Autumn terms – available in-school or on site
• a two-hour CPD workshop for history, drama or art teachers interested in the application of archival materials
• a two-hour workshop for college or adult learners on how to utilise archival materials
• a photogrammetry workshop for educators

Please email sophie@mslprojects.co.uk for more details.

A sister project in Medway started with the stories from recent immigrants and linked these to the waves of previous immigrants and the achievements all have made to the UK.