Subjective Geographies @ Woodbury Salterton

1 Subjective Geographies @ Woodbury Salterton Priscilla Trenchard and Patrick Dillon With special thanks to: The villagers who took part in this survey, the children and staff at Woodbury Salterton C of E Primary School, and members of the Woodbury Salterton Women’s Institute. Debbie Jung who provided the scarecrow distribution map. Thanks also to Philippe Planel and Emma Rouse, Wyvern Heritage and Landscape Consultancy. This project was funded and supported by the East Devon Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and English Heritage. All OS Mapping provided with the assistance of the East Devon AONB Partnership © Crown Copyright and database rights 2013 Ordnance Survey 100023746 2 Contents Introduction 4 Subjective geographies 4 Woodbury Salterton 6 What we did 8 What we found 9 Community engagement 9 Mapping memory, visitor, word and colour associations and favourite walks 10 Colour association pictograms 15 Overview of mapping of all groups 16 Photographic surveys 16 Reflections on the process 19 Conclusions 20 Where next? 21 3 Introduction The parishes of Woodbury and Branscombe are taking part in a pilot of the Historic Environment Action Plan (HEAP) scheme under the auspices of the East Devon Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) Partnership, funded by English Heritage and in conjunction with Wyvern Heritage and Landscape Consultancy. The scheme is concerned with identifying and exploring important heritage features in the landscape and creating a strategic, community-based action plan. As part of this scheme, Woodbury Salterton held two ‘mapping workshops’, in May and October 2014. The format in each was similar: between 15 and 20 people attended and worked with historic maps of the village - a map of the Manor from 1796, the 1839 Tithe map, and the 1880 Ordnance Survey map. The maps were reproduced at a similar scale and compared with the current Ordnance Survey map. The survival or disappearance of certain landscape features – buildings, woods, orchards, field boundaries - was plotted on the current map. The work in Woodbury Salterton is part of the action plan for the whole of the Woodbury parish. At both mapping workshops the participants were mainly people who had lived in the village for between five and twenty years. They had a deep commitment to the village but knew very little about its history. One of the most valuable aspects of both workshops was the end of session discussions when outcomes of the mapping were reviewed relative to the history of the landscape. In the first workshop, when members of the Woodbury Local History Society were present, there was a particularly rich discussion about historical influences on the landscape. Several participants said the new knowledge they gained was for them the most valuable part of the workshop. With so much more mobility nowadays, and people moving around in pursuit of their careers, it is commonplace to find villagers who are interested in, and committed to, their surroundings but have little historical understanding of them. This is especially so with villages like Woodbury Salterton which are within the commuting catchment of a fast expanding town or city. This begs some questions: what aspects of the village do residents value and which parts of the village fabric do they engage with? How do these aspects of present day engagement relate to the history of the village? To address these questions, a small extension project on ‘subjective geographies’ was conducted in Woodbury Salterton in the autumn of 2014. Subjective Geographies The investigation on subjective geographies in Woodbury Salterton was conducted within a cultural ecological framework. The framework recognises that people engage with their surroundings both ‘formally’, within national and local legislative and organisational structures, and ‘informally’ through their day-to-day activities. The history of a village is derived mainly from documentary records (typically associated with legislative and organisational structures) and the ‘imprint’ on the landscape left by the activities of people (e.g. their buildings, artefacts, forms of land use, working practices etc.). We construct plausible stories around these records and imprints, formalised, tidied-up accounts of what was and what might have been, i.e. local history. Very little of the detail of the day-to-day activities of people, the messiness of their lives, survives in the historical record. ‘Subjective geographies’ is a branch of cultural ecology that deals with an aspect of the day-to-day activities of people: the places they feel some attachment to and the ‘meanings’ that these places hold for them. People’s subjective engagement with the places in which they live and work has become a vibrant area of study since the pioneering work in the 1980s of the environmental charity Common Ground who devised ‘rules for local distinctiveness’ (figure 1). In the 4 words of Common Ground: “Everywhere means something to someone. You don’t have to own it, or even see it every day, for a place and its stories to be important to you.” Fight for authenticity and integrity. Value the common place. Our cultural landscapes are our ordinary history and everyday nature intertwined. Change things for the better, not for the sake of it. Let the character of the people and place express itself. Defend detail. Respond to the local and the vernacular. Local dialect should be spoken, heard and seen. Enhance the natural features - rivers and brooks, hills and valleys, woods and heaths. We need enchantment, clear streams as well as clean water, in our daily lives. Take the place's fingerprint. Think and talk about places and people. Get to know your ghosts. The hidden and unseen stories and legends are as important as the visible. Don't fossilize places. History is a continuing process, not just the past. Celebrate time, place and the seasons with feats and festivals. All of our surroundings are important to someone. Places carry meaning in their associations and symbolisms. Keep the fruit, vegetable and local produce markets open and alive. Names carry reasonances and secrets. Respect local names and add new ones with care. Let nature in. Encourage the plants that want to grow in your locality. Champion the ordinary and everyday. Get to know your place intimately. Search out particularity and patina. Help add new layers of interest. Reveal the geology. Use the brick and stone of the locality. Reinforce the colour, patterns, craftsmanship and work of the place. Remember the depth of people's attachment to places. Reveal the past. Decay is an important process. Don't tidy things up so much that the layers of history and reclamation by nature are obliterated. Let continuity show. Every place has its own distinctiveness dimensions. Slowdown. Wisdom comes through walking, talking and listening. Don't let the signs of the times destroy the power of the place. Figure 1 Common Ground rules for local distinctiveness (abridged) Engagement with places, of the type implied by the Common Ground rules, comes from peoples’ ‘lived experiences’, their day-to-day activities in their surroundings. In the longer term, the day-to- day activities of many people in particular places means that these places accrue some sort of collective significance; there are reasons why they are significant (see the Common Ground ‘rules’) and these reasons may be expressed as ‘collective understandings’ (figure 2). Figure 2 Relationship between people’s attachments to places and the collective meanings they generate 5 Subjective geographies interact with local histories. The two are complementary not mutually exclusive. This is the foundation for the HEAP extension project described here, to map the subjective geographies of some of the residents of Woodbury Salterton. Woodbury Salterton Woodbury Salterton is part of the civil parish of Woodbury in East Devon. It is located between the eastern boundary of the AONB and the Exe Estuary (figure 3). Exeter is six miles to the west, the Exmouth-Budleigh Salterton section of the Jurassic Coast is four miles to the south, and Woodbury Common and the Pebblebeds heathlands are close by to the east. In the 2011 census, Woodbury Salterton had a population of 593. It is substantially rural with scattered settlements and a residential core concentrated along Village Road and the cul-de-sacs branching off it. There is a church, school, village hall and pub (The Diggers Rest) but no shop or Post Office (figure 4). There are large industrial estates to the north of the village. Woodbury Salterton Figure 3 Location map: Woodbury Salterton There has been earlier work on subjective geographies in Woodbury (although it was not labelled as such at the time). Common Ground has long promoted parish maps, which can be made by anyone, in any way, with any material. Typically, parish maps pick out features or record practices that have some significance within a community. In 1994, a Parish Map was made for Woodbury by Pippa Thompson to commemorate the centenary of parish councils (figure 5). The hand drawn map is annotated with historical information and illustrated with paintings of topographical and natural historical interest. 6 School Church Digger’s Rest Village Hall Children’s Play Area Book Exchange Figures 4 & 5 Google Earth image annotated with public facilities (above) and section of parish map (below) 7 What we did The new work on subjective geographies required methods that could be easily applied to groups of people. Previous work by one of us with young people has shown that memories and word and colour associations are good ways of finding out how they engage with and value their surroundings. Getting people to take photographs during their day-to-day activities in the village is another good way into subjective geographies. We also reviewed how people engaged with two recent community projects in the village: a ‘scarecrow’ event and the ‘book exchange’ housed in the former telephone box.

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