Oxford Road, Reading: Re-imagining the High Street Through Your Stories

As a High Street Heritage Action Zone (HSHAZ), Reading Borough Council was awarded a £85,000 grant from Historic England to create and deliver community-led cultural activities on the high street over the next three years.

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This case study is part of a series from the LGA Culture Commission

Introduction 

As a High Street Heritage Action Zone (HSHAZ), Reading Borough Council was awarded a £85,000 grant from Historic England to create and deliver community-led cultural activities on the high street over the next three years. Ahead of this, the Council was awarded a pilot grant for Re-imagining the high street through your stories. Based in Reading’s Oxford Road HSHAZ, the project engaged Oxford Road communities, to explore people’s real stories of Oxford Road and to link them with their local heritage and rich multicultural history. 

The challenge

Reading’s Oxford Road is one of Reading’s most cosmopolitan neighbourhoods, it is home to families and individuals who can trace their ethnic roots to all corners of the globe. Reading’s Oxford Road is amongst the most densely populated and cosmopolitan neighbourhoods in the UK. 

To enhance the understanding of Reading’s heritage by revealing its hidden histories and to give the community a sense of pride and ownership in developing the town’s future.  

The solution

Historic England offered several Pilot Grants to the HSHAZ schemes to initiate and test projects to engage communities, during the Covid pandemic, in September 2020. Reading was successful in achieving a grant of £9,231 to run a pilot project for the HSHAZ. This pilot project: Re-imagining the high street through your stories focusses on the Oxford Road conservation area.  

During our community engagement research, many residents told us that they would like to see unsightly areas such as hoardings brightened up and see modern artwork that reflected and celebrated the Oxford Road area positively. 

The aim of this cultural pilot project was to engage with the Oxford Road communities, to explore people’s real stories of Oxford Road and to link them with their local heritage and rich multicultural history. The project delivered an online community exhibition Oxford Road Stories hosted by Reading Museum.  

Grass roots community groups and cultural organisations will have the opportunity to lead cultural activities as well as having access to a mentoring scheme that aims to support groups to access funding in the future. 

The impact

These art pieces celebrate the history, heritage and vibrancy of culture of Reading’s Oxford Road. 

Welcome to Oxford Road Mural by AZUCIT 



The council commissioned local graffiti artist Arron Lowe (AZUCIT) to create a ‘Welcome to Oxford Road’ mural on a large hoarding. Arron came up with a design that was discussed with a community and partner panel at an online meeting to create the final design. The piece has had an amazing response locally. View the ITV coverage of the arts works on Oxford Road. 
Caroline Streatfield – Hidden Recipes from the Ancestral Home 



Local artist Caroline Streatfield produced a set of 17 recipe cards showcasing family recipes, which can all be cooked using local ingredients from the Oxford Road, these recipe cards include stories and memories from the contributors as well as illustrations created by local school children and artists. 
Baker Street Productions developed a multi-sensory, three-dimensional tour of the Oxford Road, creating an engaging narrative through which participants explore the heritage of the buildings and people along the Oxford Road, discovered via intriguingly placed QR Codes to access 12 different audio bites telling stories from residents, historical accounts of the road’s history and reflect on the rich experiences of life in a multi-cultural and diverse community. 
Gemma Anusa – Through your eyes. Gemma Anusa, a local artist and Oxford Road resident, has created two paintings that have been digitised and attached to railings along the Oxford Road. Gemma’s paintings feature two faces that she has depicted with a gradient skin tone from white to black to represent the multicultural community of the Oxford Road. In the multicoloured background Gemma has included quotes and words from the community.   

How is the new approach being sustained?

The success of the initial community engagement through the cultural pilot grant project informed the wider Reading’s cultural programme bid for the three conservation areas, to deliver Covid-19 secure activities and events that build lasting community trust, engagement and participation.  

Following the successful pilot, in December 2021, Reading was awarded a £85,000 grant to develop a programme of activities and events to celebrate their local character and heritage, making our high streets a key place to experience and participate in culture and heritage. The programme will create and deliver community-led cultural activities within the HSHAZ area high streets with the active participation and support of the project Cultural Consortium, whose membership comprises well-established local cultural organisations such as Reading Festival’s Partnership Group, Reading Cultural Education Partnership (CEP) and the University of Reading. 

Two successful artists call out projects will deliver: 

  • Reside Dance will work with local primary school pupils and their families using movement, creative games and artwork. ReConnect, an after-school arts programme will offer families a different context to reconnect, heal fraught relationships through play and laughter, leave laptops and screens behind, and enjoy the present moment of being together. This project will culminate in the sharing of the artistic work created at the schools’ summer fayres. 

  • Local visual artists Lisa-Marie Gibbs and Philip Newcombe will be running workshops with members of the Oxford Road community looking at how objects hold our own personal and collective stories. Using sound recording, sculpture, text and other forms of art making the workshops will allow participants to discover ‘hidden stories’ and as a collective bring these stories of the people and place of the Oxford Road to life. This project will culminate in the creation of ‘The Oxford Road Times’ a free newspaper, that will be distributed in newsagents, shops and outlets along the Oxford Road in Reading, that will hold the stories and highlight the creativity and the spirit of the diverse and multi-cultural voices of the area. 

Lessoned learned

Key learning from our pilot projects: 

  • In the community story telling part of the project, not being able to engage face to face during the pandemic made a significant difference. It was clear from the various means of communication that we tried (social media, email, leaflets, surveys) that face to face is the most successful way to engage with the community and that conversations and informal chats are much more well received than surveys to collect authentic responses. 

  • Working with artists who had not managed a funded project before did mean support was required with timings, resource and participant updates. 

How we are going to respond to these key learnings: 

  • In the main Cultural Programme, we work with/give opportunities to those that have not had the opportunity to lead funded projects. We need to ensure that the project leads involve their resident participants in each stage of their process and keep them well informed. 

  • We have increased the timescale to apply for funding and have simplified the application process. We are now also offering professional mentoring from well-established local cultural originations, working in collaboration with the project leads to ensure their proposals are achievable and not overly ambitious so that they can deliver in the timeframe and budget.  

Contact

Donna Pentelow, email: [email protected]