nick's blog

Illness troubling volunteer

Phyllis, one of our long-standing volunteers has been ill over the last year. Recently, she has suffered a relapse and has been unable to participate actively with the MHMS project. We will be picking up on the loose ends of her current projects as the next few weeks go by. If you need to contact us regarding these initiatives, please use the Contact us feature on the website or call 01273 206306.
We wish Phyllis well and look forward to seeing her again soon.

MyHouseMyStreet - more on posters

Of course, we still had some posters that were not distributed before the exhibitions began on the 11th. We decided to take these down with us on the day and hope that people would come and collect them from the various MyHouseMyStreet desks around town.
What a pleasure it was to be approached by enthusiastic people asking if, perhaps, we had made  a poster for them, "like the one in my neighbour's window". We did not fail a single person making such a request and the look of excitement and interest on their face when we came up with the goods was very worthwhile.
Thank you all who made our day!
 
PostScript - We still have a small number of posters that we were unable to distribute on the 11th and we are now receiving emails from people who were away on extended vacations during the event who would like them. We plan to take all of the posters to the Jubilee Library and distribute them from there. Watch the website for an announcement of when we will be at the Library - probably early in October.

MyHouseMyStreet Posters

As you can imagine, it's been a huge challenge to distribute the many house posters produced for this year's exhibitions; some 600 in total. Our volunteers have made repeated visits to streets over the last few weeks, noting when people will be in and distributing posters accordingly. Despite this, there have been homes where contact has eluded us and days before the 11th we still do not have posters in place.
Therefore, a huge 'thank you' to those local residents that took it upon themselves to volunteer as coordinators for their streets and assist us with the distribution challenge. We really are very grateful for your help.
 

Brighton & Hove Open Door 2011 launches

Well, here we are again, it's time for Brighton & Hove Open Door!
The 2011, event starts today, 8 September, with a guided tour of The Regency Town House at 0900 and continues until late on the 11th; by which time a further 124 events will have been delivered!
Of course, our flagship events are the MyHouseMyStreet exhibitions. Those in George Street and Dorset Street are experiments focusing in particular on 1861, 150 years ago this year, those elsewhere are more general and cover from the construction of a street up to 1974/5.
If you are going to any BHOD 11 activities, please do consider completing a visitor assessment form. Your feedback really does help us improve the presentations made each year.
Well, it's time to open the door at the Town House. Hope to see some of you in the next few days!

Printing MHMS posters, at last

After nearly a year of collecting and processing directory and census data, we are arriving a the point where we are now ready to produce occupancy posters for our street exhibitions in September. Over the next couple of weeks we will make some 600 such posters, each listing the past occupants on an individual house in the city.
 
Posters are interesing for a variety of reasons, some for example, stand out for the sheer numbers of people they reveal to have onced lived in a partiular property, others for the strange professions residents were following.
 
Whatever the information revealed, the main attraction for the residents we've worked with is, of course, that they get to discover who lived in their house before them and we have had a great response from people preparing to display the posters. Now, we hope for good weather and a large number of people turning out to see them in situ.

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