Songs of the Streets is a participatory heritage project, which explores the oral & community heritage of the area around Holy Trinity Church in Sunderland (now Seventeen Nineteen). Musicians, Paige Temperley and Holly Rees, have worked with residents to gather unique local stories about their own heritage & have turned the stories into songs, creating a unique music map of Old Sunderland.
Working with project partners Seventeen Nineteen, Sunderland’s Heritage Action Zone and other local community groups, such as Back on the Map and Sunderland Mind, We Make Culture has collected stories from the area, focusing on under-represented stories of women and the working class communities which surround Holy Trinity. We’ve also worked with 17Nineteen’s History Detectives, their team of amazing volunteers, who are using archives to research Sunderland’s various untold histories.
We also worked with illustrator Kathryn Robertson, who created a map of the locations which inspired the songs.
The 10 newly-created community songs have been performed at the opening of Seventeen Nineteen in April 2022, and will continue to be performed at events in the city. The songs can also be accessed on Soundcloud and on the Echoes app, creating a unique geo-located song-trail of the East End, via this link: https://explore.echoes.xyz/collections/V7WFv9NaTf9Bw8Qk
Songs of the Streets is a partnership project between We Make Culture and Seventeen Nineteen, and has been made possible due to funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund. Many thanks to National Lottery players.