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This article explores notions of publicness in relation to the recent history of Union Street, Plymouth. Drawing on personal memories of going 'downtown' as a teenager in combination with urban planning policy, I use Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque and Stephen Lyng’s investigation of edgework to critique planning policies that contributed to the physical and conceptual marginalisation of the erstwhile centre of Plymouth's nightlife.
Image credit: Still from John Walmsley spending the night with the police on Union Street, circa. 1990. Southwest Film and Television Archive (SWFTA)
Written with Sophie Hope, this article critically reflects on the limitations and challenges of using Cards on the Table (COTT) to evaluate experiences of participation in art projects, highlighting the tension between our desire to research in a co-productive, community-led, and action-oriented way and the realities of conducting research with a vast network of participants and limited time and budget.
Image credit: COTT at OpenbareWerken_©LeontienAllemeersch-7
Since 2009 Alistair Gall and Dan Paolantonio have been running an open-access DIY film collective called Imperfect Cinema (IC). In this article, I discuss their ongoing project Home of Movies which brings to light Plymouth’s largely forgotten cinema history by engaging a local community through screenings, history walks, and film-making workshops. I emphasise the importance of the DIY and imperfect in IC’s practice, which allows them to engage hard-to-reach communities.
Image credit: Flyer for an Imperfect Cinema event. Courtesy of Imperfect Cinema.
In this article, I consider the position of the researcher in relation to local archives. I talk about Plymouth post-WWII planning through Jill Craigie’s film The Way We Live (1946) and how I found new ways to think about the Film’s production by reading a series of personal correspondence in Plymouth City Museum (now The Box) archives.
Image credit: Film poster for The Way We Live, dir. Jill Craigie (IMDB)