You Can Make History: Extending and developing youth engagement in cultural heritage.

This project follows on from "'You Can't Move History. You Can Secure the Future': Engaging Youth in Cultural heritage". This project on the Long Live South Bank (LLSB) campaign to save the skate spot in the Undercroft from redevelopment was funded by the AHRC. Until recently, the involvement of young people in heritage debates has typically been as part of a rhetorical strategy that serves to speak for them as future stakeholders. However, as this project demonstrated, the campaign to save the Undercroft was led by young people who were highly engaged political subjects capable of defining their own claims to urban space.

There are two stands of academic research underpinning this project. The first strand asks how successive generations of young people developed attachments to the skate spot. The second strand engages with the way in which LLSB activists communicated their attachment to the Undercroft to policy makers and the wider public. Both strands draw on an existing body of archival material and new walking interviews, film interviews and oral histories to develop an understanding of the micro-politics of heritage campaigns.

During the project we collaborated critically and creatively with community filmmakers, the BrazenBunch, as well as with the youth engagement officers of the Heritage Lottery Fund. We produced a film and an online exhibition which were presented to heritage and arts organizations during a workshop in central London. Since then we have written and circulated a report drawing out the key themes discussed during the workshop. These processes were genuinely collaborative and were experienced by the academics, filmmaker, campaigners and policy makers as an extremely positive, creative and critical dialogue.

The new project aims to continue to extend and develop this participatory ethos. To achieve this we will:

Organize a travelling series of screenings for our award-winning film 'You Can't Move History', followed by discussions. Six screenings will take place over the course of a year. Two screenings will engage with audiences interested in thinking differently about the ways in which young people participate in public life. Two screenings will engage with audiences interested in heritage activism in locations beyond the Southbank. Two screenings will engage with audiences interested in participatory film making as a methodological approach to policy/research. All of the screenings will take place outside London.

Produce a 'coda' for the original film including footage documenting evidence of impact beyond immediate stakeholders, for example from the screening discussion outlined above. This ten-minute section of film would also document the post-workshop changes in the relationship between young people and policy makers on London's Southbank and offer the Southbank Centre a space to articulate their experience of moving towards a positive and collaborative relationship with the Long Live Southbank campaign.

Organize a screening discussion of both the original film and the newly produced 'coda' which will be timed to coincide with the opening of the restored sections of the Undercroft and the Children and Young People's Centre. This event will enable us to demonstrate the ways in which innovative research methods of engagement and co-production feed into policy-making and contribute to the development of better understanding of the ways in which young people articulate their claims to urban space and in doing so participate in public life. Three workshop attendees have expressed an interest in hosting this event (from the Southbank Centre, the British Film Institute and the Museum of London). However, as this decision depends in part upon factors out of our hands (such as the completion of building work!), it will be taken in 2018.

The travelling series of screenings/discussions will develop and expand the project's original impact in London by presenting it to entirely new audiences of young people, heritage organisations and policy makers in the UK. In addition to the increase in geographical scope, the travelling series of screenings and discussions will generate audiences with an interest in the issues raised beyond the specifics of the Undercroft as a site of contestation. It will therefore create participatory spaces in which new audiences in new locales can consider the way in which young people define their own claims through the occupation of public space, the role of heritage activism in preserving previously marginalised memories and histories, and the capacity of participatory film making to articulate voices which have had a tendency to be unheard and the dilemmas associated with receiving and acting on these voices. In this way the travelling series of screenings and discussions will increase the visibility of the way in which early career researchers' work funded by the AHRC contribute to the construction of both public space and public more widely than the original project.

The ten-minute extension to our award-winning film 'You Can't Move History' will enable us to demonstrate some of the unforeseen impacts of the original project. This 'coda' will document the impact of the project as evidenced by the traveling series of screenings and discussions. It will also show the way in which the original workshop created a space which bought all the participants involved in the development of the Undercroft together for the first time and acted as a catalyst for the current collaboration between the Southbank Centre and the Long Live Southbank campaign. Last, but by no means least, it will offer a space in which the Southbank Centre experience of 'hearing' the heritage claims of young people could be incorporated into the narrative. The potential impact of such an account on policy makers both within and beyond the heritage sector will be invaluable.

The final event will offer an opportunity to bring together the different stakeholders from both the original project and the follow-on project at the moment in which the Undercroft is restored. It will develop the impact already being generated by the project, build upon previously established networks, and extend the links between young people, heritage organizations and arts institutions. As such, this event will bring into the public domain ideas and issues emerging from the previous workshop which was - in recognition of the at that time unresolved tensions over the future of the Undercroft - limited to a carefully curated group of stakeholders. In this way, follow-on funding will consolidate the standing of the project as an 'inspiration' and a 'provocation' (Head of Historic England) used by an increasing number of policy makers within the heritage and arts sector to think differently about the way in which young people engage with cultural heritage. Finally, it will offer an opportunity to highlight the two articles which underpinned the original project and, in doing so, it will demonstrate the way in which publicly funded research contributes to our understanding of both material and symbolic public spaces.

Last, but by no means least, follow-on funding will enable us to continue to monitor the impact of the original research and to rework the website so that the longevity and accessibility of the material gathered over the course of the two projects can be guaranteed.