Output details

'The aerodrome' : art, heritage and landscape at former RAF Coltishall

This joint paper provides contrasting perspectives on a site based project at RAF Coltishall (Norfolk, UK). The process involved an innovative extended collaborative investigation involving archaeologists and artists. It presented a rare opportunity to experience and document a military site while it remained in use, and in the period ofdrawdown and closure; to watch as things were packed away and as families left.

Documentation of the process was heterogenous, ensuring those who created the record did so according to their own perceptions, instincts and agenda. Each participant reflects on their differing methodologies, using film, photography and sound recording alongside conventional heritagepractice. The article, therefore, is not a single interpretation of Coltishall. Rather, it presents four separate but interlinked and overlapping interpretations, presented in the form of responses to the same place, visited and experienced by all participants at the same time. Multivocality within the documentation team itself is emphasised, and the benefits of this form of multi-vocality for heritage interpretation.

The article describes the background to this project, the methodologies developed, and ultimately the various (and at times very different) responses to the site. As with any landscape investigation,what was seen and how it was interpreted varied between investigators. Widely differing views on what was significant about this space, what components of the landscape best represented that significance, and how to record them led to a rich range of visual outputs.

The atmospheres and character of such sites as Coltishall have bled into popular consciousness through fiction or feature film, but a sense that these places are and were a site of daily life can easily be overlooked. In the imminent period of recasting the scale and nature of the UK armed forces, such studies may prove relevant.