sharing Solihull's local history
Don’t forget to share your day today, Tuesday 12th November. Feel free to reply here, or share via Twitter with the hashtag #soliday, or post on our Facebook wall, or write a one-day diary and drop it off at any Solihull Library, or email heritage@solihull.gov.uk.
You can also post pictures to Flickr or videos to YouTube.
Looking forward to everyone’s contribution:-)
Tracey
If you, or someone you know, want to share your Solihull Life In A Day via Twitter but don’t know where to start, here are some useful links and tips.
Creating an account
First of all, you need to create an account with Twitter. It’s free of charge – all you need is an email address and an idea of the Twitter user name you want (which must be no longer than 15 characters and not already in use by someone else). Twitter has a brief step-by-step guide to setting up an account.
You can use Twitter by logging in to the website, but on smartphones or tablets, many people find it much more convenient to download an app (either the official Twitter app, or a third-party Twitter client) to view and create tweets.
Followers
Once you log into Twitter, you will see your timeline, which will be constantly updated to display tweets from people you follow. Take care when choosing who to follow so that they’re people whose tweets you’re interested in, otherwise you’ll soon feel overwhelmed by irrelevant messages and may wonder why you bothered with Twitter! Having said that, you can unfollow people at any time if you find that their tweets aren’t relevant to you.
Of course, it would be great if you followed @OurSoliday (that’s us) but you don’t actually have to follow us in order to participate in Solihull Life In A Day. You can easily follow us by clicking on the button below, though.
If you fancy recording your ‘Life in A Day’ in Solihull visually on 12th November, we’d be very glad of contributions through photos or drawings – whatever you feel works best for you.
We’ve set up a Flickr group – although there’s nothing there just yet, of course! However, please do post your contributions to the OurSoliday group there if you upload any images of your day to Flickr. If you make them available under a Creative Commons licence, it will be easier for us to collect the images together for our Solihull Life in A Day time capsule.
It may be obvious but we only know about the past because of the documents, photos and stories that people have left behind. Without this evidence, the past is a mystery.
I once worked with an inspirational Advisory Teacher who told me how she explained this concept of evidence to teachers on INSET days. As all the teachers arrived for the session, they were asked to jot down their impressions of the room – for example, whether it was warm or cold, bright or dark. Having collected all the notes together, the Advisory Teacher then threw away all but one of the notes. The surviving note was then read out as the definitive description of what the room was like. No one else’s opinion mattered.
This is what happens with history – it can be only the opinion of one or two people that goes forward into the future. What everyone else thought, felt or experienced is lost unless it’s recorded and preserved in some way. Traditionally, it’s the voice of kings, queens and the important/powerful that has survived to come down to us. Since the 1960s, it’s been increasingly recognised that it’s vital also to document people’s more everyday experiences.
This is what we’re hoping to do with Solihull Life In A Day on Tuesday 12th November. The more contributions we can get, the better the chance that our time capsule will be more broadly representative of people’s experience. Please encourage everyone you know who lives, works or studies in the Solihull borough, or who will be visiting on #soliday to share their day with us all.
Tracey
On 24th July 2010, people in 192 countries filmed their day. 4,500 hours of footage were put together by film-maker Ridley Scott into this 90-minute film capturing a snapshot of life on the planet.
If you fancy trying to capture your day in a video for Solihull Life in A Day on 12th November, please do! If you upload it to YouTube, please tag it with soliday, and we’ll create a playlist of your videos. It doesn’t have to be a full-length film like this one, even a minute or two would be great. Just share with us the parts of your day that are most important to you.
Tracey
I love this story from someone who moved to Kingshurst in 1972.
Every Friday my friends and I piled all the kids into big old-fashioned prams and walked over to the new shopping centre at Chelmsley Wood. We’d do our grocery shopping and then buy a big bag of chips, a loaf of bread and a tub of margarine and walk down to the river by the police station. We’d take off the kids’ shoes and socks and let them paddle while we made a mountain of chip butties. We’d sit them all down with a chip butty and pass a big bottle of cheap fizzy pop around and sit on the river bank. Our kids loved it and thought they’d had a super day out!
On Tuesday 12th November 2013, everyone living, working, studying or visiting any of the places that make up the Borough of Solihull is invited to share their day with each other and with future generations through social media, photos, videos, or written diaries.
The contributions will be archived by the borough’s Heritage & Local Studies Service to capture the everyday life of the borough in a single ordinary day, creating a fascinating time capsule to show what it was like to be alive in Solihull on this particular day.
In a similar way to Mass Observation’s one-day diaries we want you to tell us about your day on 12th November. You can tell us whatever seems appropriate to you.
We’ll put further details here over the next few weeks but, if you want any further information in the meantime or have any questions please post a comment here or get in touch with Tracey Williams at Solihull Central Library on 0121 704 6934 or by email.
Tracey
Solihull Life 