Memories of 'Mr Seel's Garden': Engaging with historic and future food systems in Liverpool

Lead Research Organisation: University of Manchester
Department Name: Social Sciences

Abstract

On the outer edges of Liverpool ONE, a 42 acre regeneration area of the city centre, there is a Tesco Superstore. This is unremarkable in itself - you can't go very far in Liverpool without running into one - however, if you venture just around the corner of the main entrance you'll find a set of plaques that reproduce an 18th Century map of the area. The description states that this area was once 'Mr Seel's Garden'. Drawing the contemporary viewer into a lost past, the description states: "you are standing on what was the garden, represented by an asterisk". You are not all that stands on what was the garden, however, as the Tesco itself is also directly on top of the garden site. Yet, even while you might catch yourself becoming a little nostalgic - imagining a kindly Mr Seel handing you a freshly cut cabbage - the description lets you know that "Thomas Seel was an eighteenth century merchant. He made money out of the dreadful slave trade, but used some of it to pay for Liverpool's first infirmary".

The uncanny juxtaposition of current and historic food systems, made visible by this map, has been commented on by a number of Liverpool local food activists. The vivid experience it produces, draws together multiple elements - food, maps, history, time, power, cruelty, memory, intertwined local and global communities - to paint a complex picture of the changing nature of communities and the systems that connect them together. Our pilot demonstrator project aims to engage with the productive knots and tangles woven together by 'Mr Seel's Garden' through a collaboration between a broad range of partners with a shared interest in time, food and community engagement. Working with community organisations within Liverpool's fledgling local food movement, this project will explore how engaging local communities with the changing patterns of food production could contribute to current grassroots efforts within Liverpool to raise awareness around current food issues.

To describe the specifics of the project in brief: volunteer and academic researchers will use a combination of research methodologies - oral history, archive research and site identification/documentation - to build up a multi-layered picture of the changing nature of food systems in Liverpool. The data gathered from each of these activities will be made available to wider community on a project web page, and will feed into a creative strand that will develop a locative media application for GPS enabled smartphones, as well as a print media historic local food walking tour. These outputs will help to disseminate the results of the research work, while also raising awareness of local food issues and the project partners themselves. The overall process itself will provide material to support philosophical research into the interconnections between social understandings of time and community, archaeological research into methods of engaging communities with the historical environment and research into the pragmatic and affective aspects of archive use.

In its methods and overall approach, the project contributes to the Connected Communities programme by demonstrating the possibilities of making significant research contributions to a number of arts and humanities disciplines through the development of practical, creative and theoretical responses to community identified interests and challenges. In so doing it will address the core research concerns of the Programme by utilising comparative and historical methods to explore both how communities change over time, and how the process of historical research can itself impact on community responses to current challenges.

Planned Impact

In addition to the academic beneficiaries outlined in the previous section, this project promises to be of benefit to a much wider group of potential users. It will be of most direct use to the community organisations themselves, by enhancing their research capacity, knowledge and skills. It will also help to raise their profiles, provide them with momentum to continue developing their local food projects, connect them to each other and to other local food organisations in Liverpool and link them with local research institutions. All the organisations are also keen to understand what interests participants in their projects and how to support this further. Our research into the experiential aspects of volunteer research work and how this shapes perceptions of the present is thus of interest to them and potentially to other community organisations working around heritage, environmental and historical issues. As a result one of the outputs of the project is an accessible report that examines benefits, issues and best practice suggestions that arise from the work.

The Friends of Everton Park are also involved in setting up an Everton History Society, which would be supported by the project and is also inspired by a previous oral history project - The Lost Tribes of Everton - which this project would connect up with. Transition Liverpool is interested in using the skills develop to assist with working on a broader sustainability project, known as an Energy Descent Action Plan. They intend to utilise the outcomes of the project to develop further history projects or 'Honouring the Elders' projects and will share the project outcomes on the Transition Network's project and resource online databases, which will then be available across the breadth of this fast growing international movement. Friends of Sudley Park are particularly interested in using the project to kickstart the development of their walled garden project and will also share the project and its outcomes with the Walled Kitchen Gardens network (http://www.walledgardens.net).

More broadly, both the Liverpool Primary Care Trust (PCT) and Liverpool City Council (LCC) have identified priorities for the 2010 - 2020 Decade of Health and Well-being. These include supporting individuals to 'connect', 'take notice' and 'keep learning'. As part of this Everton Park has been designated as a 'transformational project' in the new North Liverpool Strategic Regeneration Framework by the Liverpool City Council, Liverpool Vision, and the PCT. This project is thus well placed to contribute new perspectives to local policy initiatives that will be just getting under way. Project partners Derek Dottie (LCC) and Sarah Dewar (PCT) will be following the progress of the project and will also discuss the implications of the research outcomes with us towards the end of the project.

Local food is extremely topical nationally and internationally. The UK Local Food Network distributes £57.5 million worth of grants funding and the Making Local Food Work partnership, linking five organisations including the Soil Association and the Plunkett Foundation, are also supporting a multitude of local food projects. Both of these larger organisations, and others like them are considered to be potential users of the research. Our interest in embedding local food issues in historical cultural narratives, and understanding how experiences of temporality support change, could potentially shed light on the kinds of broader social frameworks that may enable local food projects to be more successful.

Publications

10 25 50
 
Title Local Food Poetry 
Description Poet Eleanor Rees, who was a participant in the project, wrote a series of poems responding to interviews conducted in the project, as well as her personal experiences. 
Type Of Art Composition/Score 
Year Produced 2013 
Impact The poems were performed at the final project exhibition to around 60 attendees. A film of the performance is also available on youtube. 
URL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOnvBvhrTMQ
 
Title Mr Seel's Postcard series 
Description A series of postcards which included current-day images of past or future local food sites, to help raise awareness of the project, but also to contributing to the playing with time and troubling of the relationship between past, present and future. 
Type Of Art Artefact (including digital) 
Year Produced 2012 
Impact The cards were designed so that they could serve multiple purposes, particularly as awareness raising material for the core community groups involved, and other local food groups in the city. Community groups thus used them to share information on the Mr Seel's Graden project, and their own work. 
URL http://www.mrseelsgarden.org/gallery/
 
Title Uneven LIves: A Local Food Play 
Description A short story-telling performance drawing on ideas of verbatim theatre which was developed with volunteers on the project and theatre maker Liz Postlethwaite. It was performed twice at the projects final exhibition. 
Type Of Art Performance (Music, Dance, Drama, etc) 
Year Produced 2013 
Impact The performance received positive feedback at the event, which had around 100 attendees, and videos are also available on youtube. 
URL http://www.mrseelsgarden.org/playing-with-food/
 
Description The Memories of Mr Seel's Garden project demonstrated the potential for hybrid
research/community projects to meet locally-identified needs while also producing
rigorous academic outputs. Working with members of the local food movement in
Liverpool, the academic team trained volunteers in a variety of historical research
methods. In the process new historical resources were produced which were then used
to engage people in Liverpool more widely. The outputs of the training sessions were
used as the basis of a range of creative tactics that challenged linear stories of progress,
instead troubling the relationship between past, present and future and between the
local and the global. These tactics included a bespoke iPhone app, an interactive online
map, a postcard series, local food storytelling and poetry, as well as branded food
packaging. The team is currently engaged in writing up their analyses of the process,
which will contribute to debates around affect in the archive, digital versus analogue
tools in community archaeology, perceptions of time in the local food movement and
ways of 'reterritorialising' the cloud in digital arts. The methods we developed for
utilising historical research in future-oriented activist projects will also be shared more
widely through a Handbook for Excavating the Future.
Exploitation Route Organisations interested in working with communities to think about their futures may find the method we developed helpful for bringing together a range of stakeholders to explore local histories and envision alternate futures. The Handbook which is currently underdevelopment will be particularly useful for this.
Sectors Agriculture

Food and Drink

Communities and Social Services/Policy

Creative Economy

Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software)

Environment

Leisure Activities

including Sports

Recreation and Tourism

URL http://www.mrseelsgarden.org
 
Description Our findings have been used in a range of ways. Our historical map has been useful for the local food movement in Liverpool, particularly for highlighting the number of allotments that the city used to have. We have had a number of discussions with chefs who have been interested in using historical recipes for special events around the history of food in Liverpool. The community organisations have built on the momentum of the project to set up new local history organisations and other groups outside of Liverpool have asked for advice in developing their own projects.
First Year Of Impact 2013
Sector Agriculture, Food and Drink,Environment
Impact Types Cultural

Societal

 
Title Mr Seel's Historical Local Food map 
Description The Mr Seel's Historical Local Food map provides an interactive interface which allows users to explore where local food was grown/raised within Liverpool. It includes historical allotments, dairies, orchards, farms, chicken rearing and the only one example of beekeeping that we could uncover. The data for the map arises from community led events where we searched old maps, but also via interviews and public events. 
Type Of Technology Webtool/Application 
Year Produced 2012 
Impact The map provides a tailored view into the history of Liverpool, looking specifically at local food. It has increased users knowledge of how widespread food production was and helped to augment the account of Liverpool as a 'port city' with evidence of the widespread local food production that has historically taken place. 
URL http://www.mrseelsgarden.org/maps/index.html
 
Title Mr Seel's iPhone app 
Description The Mr Seel's iPhone App lets you discover how we used to grow, make and eat food across Liverpool by scanning food products from the present day. The barcodes on all food packaging are linked to a Universal Product Code database that gives information on what a product is. Supermarkets use these codes to access details about a product including its price. When you scan a product with the Mr Seel's App it links to our own database of memories and historical notes that tell you about how food was grown, cooked and eaten in the past. Just as the local food movement is transforming the global food system, our app seeks to transform Universal Product Codes into Local Memory Codes which uncover our local food heritage. 
Type Of Technology Webtool/Application 
Year Produced 2012 
Impact The app has been used within Liverpool, indeed it can only be used in Liverpool as part of our exploration of 'reterritorialising the cloud'. It provides an example of how to link historical archival research in new and exploratory ways with the city. Users have an increased understanding of the role the ports played in the city, as well as a critical perspective on current sourcing of food. 
URL http://www.mrseelsgarden.org/food-hacking/
 
Description Eating in the Archives 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Local
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact Eating in the Archives was organised with the Liverpool University Centre for Archive Studies and brought professionals from a number of archives including the Northwest Sound Archive and the Scottish Council on Archives to share their work. The audience was very positive about the event and said that they were now more aware of archives and more likely to visit them.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2012
URL http://www.mrseelsgarden.org/eating-in-the-archives/
 
Description Final Project Exhibition (Liverpool) 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Regional
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact A one day event that included an hands-on exhibit of project outputs and a series of talks focused on local food, including a performance based on the interviews conducted in the project by the volunteers.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2013
URL http://www.mrseelsgarden.org/mr-seel-show-and-tell-at-the-bluecoat/
 
Description Information stall (Liverpool - Bold street Fest) 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Local
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact Information table on the Memories of Mr Seel's Garden project at the Hope Street Feast, Liverpool, 16th September. Similar purposes and outcomes here as the Big History information stall. We got to get the word out about our project and also collect more stories for the project.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2012
 
Description Information stall (Liverpool) 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Local
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact Information table on the Memories of Mr Seel's Garden project at the BBC Merseyside Big History Weekend, St George's Hall, 8-9 September. Attendees listened to oral interviews, explored online historical maps and learnt more about the project in general. Lots of great discussions about how food systems have changed over time and memories of local food networks in the past.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2012
URL http://www.mrseelsgarden.org/what-we-learned-at-liverpools-big-history-weekend/
 
Description Interim project exhibition for Memories of Mr Seel's Garden at Light Night 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach National
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact We were hosted by the Bluecoat gallery in Liverpool and had an exhibition to discuss interim results with the general public and also to collect their input into our crowd-sourced local food memory projects. We had around 100 attendees come through over the course of the night, many engaged with the historical maps on display contributing to the historical local food research of the project.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2012
URL http://www.mrseelsgarden.org/what-we-got-up-to-at-lightnight/
 
Description Interview on BBC Merseyside 
Form Of Engagement Activity A press release, press conference or response to a media enquiry/interview
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Regional
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact The PI participated in a radio interview on BBC Merseyside discussing the project and calling for volunteers for the oral history component of the project.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2012
 
Description Inverview for Seven Streets Liverpool 
Form Of Engagement Activity A magazine, newsletter or online publication
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Regional
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact The article helped to publicise the project more widely, but also to advertise our final public event and to encourage attendance there. We were interested in encouraging other perceptions of Liverpool 'the port city' and its history, and the article helped to disseminate some of our early research findings.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2012
URL http://www.sevenstreets.com/ground-force-mr-seels-garden/
 
Description Media article (Transition Free Press) 
Form Of Engagement Activity A magazine, newsletter or online publication
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact A short article in the Transition Free Press, aimed at participants of the Transition movement, discussing the results of the Mr Seel's Garden project and its relation to Transition approaches. The article helped to drive traffic to the project website and to publicise our work beyond Liverpool and to related activist groups.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2013
URL https://issuu.com/transitionfreepress/docs/tfp_issue3_autumn2013_issuu
 
Description Mr Seel's App Launch Event at Liverpool's Light Night 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Regional
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact 100+ attendees at an exhibition for the project which was part of Light Night Liverpool. The iPhone app was launched and attendees also explored other products including website, interactive map, postcards etc.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2013
URL http://www.mrseelsgarden.org/join-us-at-the-mr-seel-iphone-app-launch/
 
Description Public Debate (Bristol) 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Regional
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact The project's PI was an invited panellist at Public Debate: Growing Connections: How do we build a sustainable food system for Bristol's communities? as part of the Bristol Festival of Nature, Bristol, 17th June. The event was a response to local food policies being developed in the city, and our presentation explored our community engagement work around local food in Liverpool.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2012