The Down to the Coast Landscape Partnership Scheme wanted to record how the Isle of Wight’s farmed landscape and coast had changed since the Second World War, in the words of the people who worked them. Lisa Kerley of Carisbrooke Castle Museum and her band of volunteers recorded farming families in the East Wight from 2017, and people who worked the sea from 2019. Julian Winslow photographed them.
The recordings came to our team with a simple question. What can you do with these that is interesting? Few people will sit through an oral history interview that runs for an hour or more. So, working with Peter Fellows of Down to the Coast, the team proposed cutting each interview into short clips of one to two minutes, sorted into themes from harvest and the County Show to lifeboats and boatbuilding. Each clip is a hook into the full recording.
The two websites launched together in January 2021, with the full interviews, hundreds of clips and more than 800 photographs, most of them never seen before. For Farming Memories there is also an Amazon Alexa skill, which we understand was a first. It plays a new memory every morning, or all of them in a row.
