Celebrations today (Wednesday 2 April) in Pevensey and Pevensey Bay as news became public that the Pevensey Timeline Association has been awarded a lottery grant to begin work on an iconic web project.
The Association, founded eighteen months ago in October 2012, utilised a ‘feasibility study’, with help from the Hastings Trust to test if local people would like to work with a web based project that would see ‘a two thousand year timeline that tells the story of Pevensey and its rich history…’ emerge online.
The study led to formation of an association, monthly meetings and background technical work to build aspects of the foundations of the idea on the web.
A total of 22 villagers from the locality expressed interest in the project.
The Big Lottery Fund yesterday (April 1) announced that the Pevensey Timeline project had been awarded a total of £7,367 to develop the project explaining the award had been granted ‘to develop a website run by the community around the history of the area, with an aim of increasing community involvement and employability skills for local residents’.
In the application to the Big Lottery Fund, the association said;
‘The Pevensey Timeline will tell the story of the locality in 2,000 time sequenced entries over 2,000 years. It will begin with the story of the Saxons in 238AD and end with the arrival of the Olympic torch in the village in 2012′.
‘As well as being considered by historians as the place that the Norman Conquest began, the village appears on the famous Bayeux Tapestry. It is a unique village and location, it is not just Pevensey Castle that has a story to tell, the area is steeped in history, legend, myth and magic’.
‘The online project will involve a whole village being given the opportunity to learn a bit of coding to work with a production level platform that will tell the story of its own history.
‘The project will take a year to complete and begin to go up online at the end of this April (2014), with the first eighty entries and reach completion at the end of April 2015′.
Pevensey Timeline Association chair, Dianne Dear said;
‘This is a real achievement for the whole community, it will put Pevensey back on the history trail’.
Marketing co-ordinator for the project, Joy Roscoe added;
‘We are very excited indeed about the potential for this project, we can be creative and can offer a number of students some real learning opportunities, as well as working to raise the profile of the area’.
‘We feel sure that other potential sponsors will be interested to see what we are doing’.
Amongst plans for the project is the development of contact with schools across the country to promote the value of the timeline in the study of key dates on the National Curriculum ‘history timeline’ with well sourced accessible materials.
Further plans involve promoting the timeline to history buffs, researchers and genealogists who want to study a strand of local history across 2,000 years in an interesting and visually engaging way.
The historian Michael Wood, came to the locality to begin filming his landmark BBC2 series ‘The Great British Story- A People’s History’. He started the series here in Pevensey with the words ‘this is where it all began’.
The inspiration for the original project came from his words and the notion that by learning how to ‘weave some code’, like the Bayeux Tapestry, the villagers, working together, could create something iconic for the modern age that would leave a lasting legacy in the locality and become a key profiling tool for the visitor economy.
The grant from the Big Lottery fund will go towards expenses to pay for two technical staff and three tutors to support the work of up to 20 villagers, all learning how to research, edit and code the timeline for a public audience.
