The Urban Tree Festival inspiring Surrey Archives
A guest blog from Julian Pooley of the Surrey Archives
It was chance that led me to contact Andrew Stuck in April 2020. I spotted his online request for expressions of interest in contributing to a virtual Urban Tree Festival during Lockdown and wondered whether my short talk about trees in landscape and memory in the Surrey archive might be relevant. His enthusiastic response encouraged me to revise my talk, dig deeper into my own memories of trees and explore the richness of the county’s historic records for appreciating the importance of arboreal heritage.
An early photograph of trees from the Surrey Archives
Prior to Lockdown I was giving two talks a week across Surrey to local and family history groups about the historic documents in our care at Surrey History Centre in Woking. I also enjoyed regular local radio interviews about our collections and activities, but had never recorded a presentation. Preparation of ‘Not Just a Family Tree’ for the Urban Tree Festival did not just enable me to learn a new set of communication skills, it kick-started my team into a new programme of online engagement.
Though our service has dedicated pages on Surrey County Council’s website, we also have a Heritage Lottery Funded website of our own, called Exploring Surrey’s Past (ESP). Here we are able to combine search engines that bring together both our own archival finding-aids with the county’s Historic Environment Record and the collections cared for by many of Surrey’s 43 museums with themed pages exploring all aspects of the county’s rich and diverse past. It’s an interactive website because most pages have text boxes allowing our global audience to comment, share memories, post questions and engage with us.
To coincide with publication of my ‘podcast’ on the Urban Tree Festival’s website we posted it on our ‘Landscape’ themed page on ESP and also on our hitherto rarely used You Tube channel. The immediate popularity inspired us to keep going, develop more podcasts and devote a new ESP page to this new form of engagement, Surrey Heritage Video and Podcast Gallery. To date, there are 25 podcasts on these pages, covering mental health and learning disability history, family activities, Black history, sport, family history, the First and Second World Wars, Gypsy Romany and Traveller history, refugees and LGBTQ+ history. With You Tube views up by 387% on February 2020, it is clear that our small contribution to the Urban Tree Festival has transformed our ability to engage with our audience.
