Output details

Victoria Park Memoryscape

Co-authored with sound designer Lewis Gibson, the Victoria Park trail was commissioned by Barker Langham on behalf of Tower Hamlets Council as part of a £12m redevelopment programme of Victoria Park, an 86 hectare site located in East London that attracts 12 million visitors a year. Butler was awarded a £5,000 budget to research and develop an oral history-based memoryscape on the basis of his experience in combining sounds, interviews and archive recordings to make innovative trails for the Museum of London and Elmbridge Borough Council (discussed in Outputs 1 and 2). These came to the attention of the museum and heritage sector following publication of Butler’s article ‘Memory Lane: How to Produce Trails for MP3 Players That Give Listeners an Evocative Experience of Place’, Museum Practice, 40, 2007, 42-45.

The trail research consists of archival research (both documentary and audio), soundscape recordings and a series of oral history interviews with over a dozen local residents, park users and employees. Butler’s role was to direct the project, research and write the script, and conduct some of the oral history interviews, working closely with Gibson. Content-wise the trail had to cover a significant range of historical material. It also had to work when listened to in any direction or order. Where possible the less visible and less well-known but locally significant aspects of park life were included through the voices of the interviewees. The trail is available for free download and players can be borrowed from the park's visitor information centre.