About the Project
Tyneside Treasures is a web resource created as part of a Heritage Schools project involving Year 8 History students from St. Cuthbert’s Catholic High School, Newcastle upon Tyne and Year 8 English students from Park View School, County Durham working with Newcastle University Library’s Education Outreach team.
Local illustrations from Newcastle University’s Special Collections, drawn in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and depicting a variety of local landmarks, were used as inspiration for the project which gave the students the opportunity to explore and engage with their local heritage in a variety of enjoyable and innovative ways.
Students from both schools visited Newcastle University Library to see and touch the resources held there, including the Local illustrations Collection. They also visited the Discovery Museum and Tyne and Wear Archives, took part in a guided heritage walk around Newcastle and visited Newcastle Castle in order to find out more about the history of some of these significant Tyneside landmarks. In addition, students from Park View School took part in a workshop with Cap-a-Pie theatre company.
The students from St Cuthbert’s Catholic High School were then challenged to research in more detail some of these landmarks They chose to present what they had found in the form of ‘fun facts’ and also came up with quiz questions and ideas of ways to test what people had learned.
Meanwhile, the students from Park View School took an oracy focus. They were challenged by their teachers to choose either real or imagined characters from the Victorian period, who had some connections to the places and buildings they had been learning about, and to write and perform monologues, dialogues or conversation pieces as if they were that historical character. In order to immerse themselves in the Victorian era, their teachers also arranged for the students to visit Beamish.
The website which serves to both showcase the student’s work and to enable other people to learn about the heritage of the local area was then developed by the Digital Library Services team (lib-web@ncl.ac.uk) at Newcastle University with help from Jess Bradley Illustration and Character Design.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all students, staff and practitioners involved in this project, with Special thanks to staff at Tyne and Wear Archives and Newcastle Castle, who ran workshops for the students and to Historic England’s Heritage Schools Programme who provided funding towards the project.
Disclaimer and Takedown notice
Whilst we take care to provide accurate information, the majority of the content for this website was researched and/or created the children taking part in this project. Newcastle University can give no assurances over accidental inaccuracies or misleading data. As such, the contents should not be relied upon as the sole source of information by users.
We have attempted to ensure that copyright and intellectual property rights have been cleared for all images published on this site. If you believe you have a claim to rights on one of the images and do not wish it to be published in this way, please contact us and we will investigate and remove immediately.
