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Discovering Southwell: Project Themes
Overall objectives
- Investing in our Heritage
- Investing in our People
- Investing in our Community
Top 6 project themes pre-survey
1. Access for All
Provide better access and signage to our fascinating culture, landscape and heritage, so as to enhance the visitor experience.
2. Creative Interpretation – Visitor Hub & Marketing
On and offsite interpretation of our distinctive natural, industrial and cultural heritage enabling more and a wider range of people to engage with it.
3. To Present and Promote our Heritage
Making the area a better place to live, work and visit and to engage a wide audience through the provision of a visitor hub, events, guidebooks, website and leaflets.
4. Educational Activities
Activities connected with our exciting natural, industrial and cultural heritage as well as training for young people and volunteers to ensure the skills needed to maintain heritage are available for the long term.
5. Go Green
Reducing environmental impacts through promoting sustainable transport.
6. Create Virtual Museum
Recording, interpreting and presenting the history of the district in a variety of ways, to provide a public resource in its own right, but also with a view to telling stories and preserving heritage assets in support of a future physical museum or heritage centre.
Survey findings – effect on our themes
- Survey findings resonate well with our 6 pre-survey themes
- Some may have to be adapted slightly to reflect their importance to the community
- Overall three objectives remain solid:
- Investing in our Heritage
- Investing in our People
- Investing in our Community
1. Access to All – support from surveys
- Creating a platform for the different groups to collaborate and work together
- Finding ways to make the existing offer available to everyone
- Developing projects that actively include young people
- Better signposting and foot and cycle paths
- Reaching people who are underrepresented:
- Disabled
- Young People
- Minority Ethnic Groups
- LGBT+ communities
- People from lower socio-economic backgrounds
2. Creative Interpretation
- Make more of Southwell’s Roman settlement – it should be accessible and visible
- Explain the Anglo-Saxon settlement
- Tell the Civil War Story – link with Newark Civil War Centre in the future
- Improved interpretation of heritage sites
- Link sites together better
- Bramley Apple Tree – important to the town – arrange better access
- More interpretation panels needed around the town
3. Visitor Hub and Marketing
- Important to have a visitor hub/interpretation centre
- The Burgage singled out for better interpretation
- Better coordination of dissemination of information/promotion of what is available
- Much archaeology that people don’t see
4. Educational Activities
- Facilitate a sustainable new way for individuals, groups and organisations to work together to share resources, skills and knowledge
- Train volunteers at natural heritage sites
- Empower young people to undertake heritage related social action
- Roman and Anglo Saxon history needs to be told
5. Go Green
- Younger generation’s interest in supporting environmental action to be supported
- Improve cycle/footpaths
- Seek support from Brackenhurst
- Many respondents showed an interest in outdoor activities
6. Virtual Museum
- Digitise archives held by different organizations and put them online
7. Additional Theme – Infrastructure
- Sensitive development of appropriate infrastructure to cope with increased numbers
- Important for the town to retain a vibrant and sustainable independent retail and business core