Joint aims:

• Transform 3 town centre sites to improve the tourist offer & have a real impact on communities

• Set up cross border partnerships in 3 areas:

- Revealing cultural assets: archaeologists & learning & access officers (L&A)

- Revealing cultural centres: curators, restoration & technical experts

- Involving communities in culture: L&A officers + Community Engagement officers (CE)

• Add significant value to the transformation work planned through the specialist collaboration to co-create innovative welcome, access, learning and CE programmes

• Create contemporary cultural centres to display the restored cultural assets & collections and make new spaces for community activity

• Increase visits & community involvement

• Promote centres

Joint objectives:

• Enhance the centres to improve customer welcome, collection display & exploration

• Organise regular specialist partnership meetings to:

- Develop innovative educational programmes and tools adapted to the public’s evolving expectations

- Improve understanding of the sites’ archaeology, the conservation of their cultural assets and exhibits, whilst exploiting the historical and cultural similarities

- Prepare an exhibition which traces each activity & phase of the project

- Widen use of centres through the development of high tech discovery tools

• Organise cross border school visits to view restoration works & pilot tools

• Create 2000 years of history resource areas

• Share project learning through 3 seminars & the publication of summary documents for specialists

• Increase the number of visitors & community participation in cultural pursuits through community engagement activities, the educational programme & the communication campaign

ACTIVITY 1: REVEALING CULTURAL ASSETS

Archeologists met 3 times to exchange findings and view each other excavations

Many local residents from the 3 towns were involved in multiple restoration and archaeology themed workshops.

Themed archeology and restoration programmes and tools were developed, trialed and are now in use at 3 sites such as mini digs, creation of mosaics, kaleidoscope activities using the restored stained glass windows as a base, wood sculptures of the sacred objects and sculpture detective trails.

ACTIVITY 2: REVEALING CULTURAL CENTRES

The key technical and professional specialists met 8 times, prepared a report on their joint learning and installed it on line. They also worked together to share technical knowledge and supplier contacts before tendering for design of their museum areas and the equipment required. The technical specialists visited Canterbury and Folkestone to view and learn about proposed showcasing, museum lighting and welcome points

Canterbury and Folkestone created Community space areas which are proving very successful and are now being used for local community group activities and temporary exhibitions.

ACTIVITY 3: INVOLVING COMMUNITES IN CULTURE

This part very much focused on educational activities, with a great deal of positive and constructive exchanges between all the learning officers to jointly:

- Develop joint educational programmes and tools such as a grinding flour machine, creating roman coins machine, ancient toy boxes, detective trails, costume boxes for workshops enacting roman soldiers and pilgrims’ scenes, which are now in use in 3 towns

- Create 166 workshops involving over 13 000 people (including 8000 schoolchildren)

- Organise many events with over 80 000 people attending.

Activity 1

• 3 specialist archaeology network meetings+ 3 exchange visits to excavations

• Many people were involved in the restoration process by participating in relevant workshops such as recreating mosaics in the image of terrazzo floors or stained glass windows and attending workshops to witness the restoration process such as The Belgian refugee paintings

• 150 schoolchildren crossed the channel to pilot learning tools and view the restoration processes

• Innovative educational archaeology and restoration workshops took place

• Archaeology and restoration themed Pop ups were exhibited in multiple high profile sites

• Bilingual articles on archaeological and restoration themes were published on website

Activity 2

• 8 specialist meetings shared knowledge to create museum areas and involve communities in culture

• Publication of numerous website articles including technical report published on line

• Improved visitor welcome thanks to installation of up to date fittings and showcases

• 529 443 visitors to Canterbury 2013 (The centre was only open for 4 months in 2012)

• More dynamic cultural centres thanks to numerous educational workshops and events taking place in community space area

• Environmentally friendly and safe lighting for the 2 centres and their showcases

• Improved experience of culture and heritage for visitor to the 2 centres

• Prior to its renovation, the Folkestone centre was virtually unknown and unvisited. There was no formal counting measure in place prior to its re-launch in 2011 but hearsay relates that there were no more than a couple of hundred visitors each year.

The 3 territories benefited more or less equally, all with a similar profile of beneficiaries detailed below thanks to the joint educational programmes undertaken by the 3 sites

• A wide range of cultural practitioners working within the museum, heritage and volunteer sector

• Local communities and l families (including grandparents and grandchildren)

• Young people (including pre-school, school and college, university groups and individuals)

• Students of all ages (including practitioners, specialists in art, heritage, local history, literature, archaeology, architecture and people interested in history

• Disadvantaged people

• People who haven’t used cultural facilities or who don’t use them regularly

The benefits primarily for Canterbury and Folkestone were the addition of a high class cultural and community facility on their territory which in turn increased visitors and therefore economic benefits.

Boulogne hasn’t benefited fully yet but thanks to the intensive education programmes has involved all of the beneficiaries detailed above. A particular success is the inclusion of the partially sighted in the project thanks to the 3 D models developed

The Effects and outcomes are

• More attractive town centres thanks to the opening of 2 new cultural centres assets, which has created 2 new tourism assets

• Strong cross border partnerships established in the archaeology, education, and curatorship fields

• Substantially increased access to culture through more than 400 educational workshops, over 80 000 people participating in cultural events, 500 000 people visiting exhibitions, and using the discovery tools, events community & history areas

• An increase (difficult to estimate) in visitors to both centres with over 6000 visiting Folkestone in its 1st year and Canterbury on course for 500 000 visitors per annum

• Increased cross border learning from the project through website articles and seminars

• Economic regeneration by increasing visitor numbers to centres, which in turn maintains & creates jobs.

TECHNICAL EXPERTISE:

Thanks to the 8 specialist meetings and frequent site visits to view work in progress, the partners learnt about:

• Best ways of showcasing products and exciting archaeological finds

• Restoration and conservation processes

• Cultural centre renovations which helped to improve the development of their own centres

• Specialist conservation and renovation suppliers in order to request quotations

EDUCATIONAL EXPERTISE

The Learning and Access officers had 13 meetings and exchange and learned enormous amounts to develop their joint tools and programmes. Without the collaboration, the Boulogne team wouldn’t have developed their 3D models for the visually impaired or their costume boxes. Without the French school trials, the Canterbury team wouldn’t have developed such successful bilingual tools

COMMUNICATION

Without the collaboration, there would have been no website with its 61 articles, no DVDs and no themed pop ups.

We have had informal exchanges and contact with partners from the BOAT, HMS and WW2 projects.

Be more realistic in the planning of the events, especially when administrative authorisations are required.

Ensure that you forecast your expenditure every 6 months in order to have time to rectify underspending issues.

Ensure that a budget is dedicated to ensuring that there is a budget coordinator in order to coordinate the partners and all the activities.

The work involved in creating a website and keeping it up to date doesn’t appear justify the amount of interest it creates. We would suggest that the time and effort involved is better used on developing press releases and films

Trying to obtain copies of all the press articles generated and convince the press to talk about Europe’s contribution was quite difficult.

The TR project was part of much larger scale urban redevelopment and regeneration programmes undertaken by the local authorities in Boulogne, Canterbury and Folkestone.
The creation of 3 cultural centres, combined with the wide range of cross border activities organized has added and will add significant value to these regeneration programmes which will last way beyond the project duration. The 3 renovated cultural centres are long lasting and will be an asset of Boulogne-sur-Mer, Folkestone and Canterbury
The large scale of public involvement were rather one shot events and not necessarily linked to a structural programme of the cities involved or embedded in the policy of the cities.
Each partner has committed budgets and resources to the running and maintenance of the cultural centres from 2014 onwards. The centres, the tools and everything the project has developed will continue to be used to encourage increased visiting and access to culture

The cultural partnerships established during the project will continue and develop after the project ends.
The cultural practitioners and educationalists have already met twice to discuss the possibility of organizing tripartite exhibitions on the WW1 theme in 2014.

There was an enormous amount of workshops and events which targeted those who don’t usually get involved in culture and heritage. The interactive nature of the workshops and events provided the opportunity for acquiring new skills.

We hope to organise tripartite exhibitions in the 3 centres from August 2014, self funded by local authority budgets. At the moment, there are no plans to apply for additional funding for a follow-up project.

We wish to keep alive the enthusiasm of the collaborative working between the partners, with a particular focus on the community outreach and educational programmes.