‘appy New Year
The ‘Hayle Churks’ mobile phone app is published on iTunes
and completely FREE. Created by Lucy
Frears to play memories and show archive pictures automatically while walking
around a Hayle route, there is also a manual feature on the published app, so
that media can be heard and played from any location in Cornwall, Britain or
the world.
“The app is an abstract experience that involves walking
through people’s memories from different decades. The walker uses the information they have:
their location, the story, archive pictures and historical facts on the map to
try to piece together the clues. The app reveals and locates experiences from Hayle’s
past and present which may nudge us to think about the future of the town and
our own legacy,” says Lucy. “At a time
when town council’s are being given planning powers, it’s important to be
reminded about the past significance of land that can, in Hayle’s case, look
derelict but is historically important.’
The app uses many memories recorded by Hayle Oral History
Project plus archive pictures from international, national and local archives
but especially Hayle Community Archive’s scanned images from personal
collections. ‘Hayle Churks’ is partly
funded by a Heritage Lottery Fund’s All
Our Stories grant and is part of Lucy Frears’ doctoral research at Falmouth
University.
“The Hayle Churks
app could be described as a love letter to Hayle but it’s not just sentimental
nostalgia or a PR exercise. As well as
happy stories and funny stores, the app reveals terrible consequences of
personal and public decisions, mistakes and wrongdoing that, perhaps, we can
learn from. It’s certainly not simply promoting a ‘good old days’ point of view
about the past.”
In addition to sound effects recorded by Frears ranging from
birds in Paradise Park to sounds on
the beach and underwater recording experiments, there are songs by Falmouth
based musician Thirty Pounds of Bone
and Hayle-born folk singer Joff Ryan, music composed by Philip Reeder and
sounds begged and borrowed from others, such as whale and dolphin recordings by
a Plymouth-based friend, Thom Green.
The app was made using the AppFurnace app-making toolkit developed
in Bristol and has been designed for iPhones with cost preventing publishing
for Android and windows smart phones at present. An iPad or iPod touch can be used to
experience the manual ‘listen at home’ setting but for those without access to
these, Frears will continue to upload many clips and photos to the ‘Hayle
Churks’ historypin website to increase access.
The app walking route can be split into short manageable
sections or walked in one go for approximately two hours starting from the Hayle Heritage Centre gate in Foundry
Square. Headphones are recommended for
the full sound experience although some testers reported that listening and
walking at the same time was tricky during the public trials set-up in March,
August and September 2013 to gain feedback. Changes were made to the app in
response to the feedback before publishing.
“One of my regrets is that I had to divert the route away
from Copperhouse as I don’t have enough stories about the Cornish Copper
Company, the original Hayle foundry,” says Frears.
Cornish Copper Company (CCC) closed before Harvey’s and long
before living memory. CCC records have disappeared,
as have many important buildings in the Copperhouse area.
“This means that the app contains more about Harvey’s, which
already dominates recent histories of the town and possibly changes the emphasis
in the story of the thirty year war between the foundries that split the town. If
anyone has any family stories passed down about CCC I’d love to hear them.”
For more information look for ‘Hayle Churks’ on iTunes and
historypin, ‘Hayle History’ on Facebook or email hayle.history@btconnect.com.
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