Community Pride Podcast Episode 5 - How did Big Local areas explore pride in the past?

Kayla Jones 00:01

For centuries humans have used games as a method of connection, learning and communication, as well as having good, safe fun. Dancing or playing games together, just like sitting down to a meal or listening to music as a group, is a universal pastime for people across the world. There are even records from as far back as 3,500BCE of the Ancient Egyptian communities playing board games together. These games have come a long way over our shared history, whether we look at immersive VR experiences and modern video games that draw people into detailed virtual worlds, the massive sports stadiums packed for local and international teams, or, as in our first episode, communities gathering for a lively game of bingo. While the types of games we play continue to evolve, the spirit of them remains the same, bringing people together to play or connecting through the joy of being present in that moment. 

One Big Local community decided to add to this tradition in a big way by creating a game featuring many of their area’s historical buildings and well-known landmarks. Boston Big Local in Lincolnshire highlighted local heritage for residents and newcomers to the area in a time where many across the country were separated by a national lockdown. 

Exploring local history and developing heritage projects can help develop a strong sense of community pride. By contributing to local initiatives such as war memorials, historic murals, archeological sites, or, as with Boston Big Local, creating their own version of the Monopoly game board, communities can connect with the rich, diverse identity of their area and become a stronger part of its ongoing story. 

I’m your host, Kayla Jones. Join me as we explore pride in the past of Big Local communities on the Community Pride podcast.

Kayla Jones 01:54

I’m speaking with Katy, who was the Plan Co-ordinator for Boston Big Local. When I got on a call with her in September 2024, funnily enough, Boston had just wrapped up their last event as a Big Local community: a lovely beach day in the summer. And I got the unique opportunity of speaking with Katy in this final reflective stage of her journey with Big Local.

Katy 02:23

I’ve been part of Boston Big Local since early 2019 until we closed yesterday. 

Kayla Jones 02:29

Wow, that must be really impactful to have had such a long journey with Big Local, and now to be wrapping it all up.

Katy 02:37

Yeah, it feels like it’s proper bookmarked. I lived in Boston all my life, and I’ve been in the voluntary sector for the last 20 years, and I’m really passionate about community development. I’ve been fortunate to work in a really good area with Boston, lots of engaged residents, lots of engaged community organisations as well, and to see it in practice has been really very, very impactful.

Kayla Jones 03:02

Looking back, Katy reflected on what Boston had set out to do as a Big Local community.

Katy 03:07

We’ve had four very strong priorities over the course of our journey. Those priorities haven’t changed, and those are improving the health and wellbeing of the people that live and work in the area, creating a more attractive environment, bringing communities together, and also supporting the local economy. So we’ve had over I would think about 150 projects that have fallen within one of those four themes, and some of them fall within a couple of them.

Kayla Jones 03:35

Boston has done art projects, litter pickups, a local food pantry, mental health initiatives, financial advice sessions and a play park, to name a few. An area that Boston has focused heavily on is heritage projects.

Katy 03:49

We’ve done some arts projects which tie in with the heritage of the area. Our two kind of main delivery projects ourselves have been games. We’ve done our own version of Monopoly. We’ve done our own version of Trumps, and the idea about that was to highlight the good in the town and not focus on the negative.

Kayla Jones 04:10

Boston Big Local were looking for ways to better connect the community and decided that highlighting local heritage could be a way that Boston’s long-term residents and newcomers could learn more about their local area. For many of these communities, they have a rich and multi-layered history that some locals already engage with, but many know little about.

Katy 04:30

Boston is a small market town in Lincolnshire. We’re on the east coast. Boston itself is right on the east coast. It’s a town full of history. Back in the Middle Ages, I think it was certainly very, very early, Boston was the second most important port town in the country, behind London. So we have the heritage involved with overseas trading. It was one of the original Hanseatic port and then obviously, a few years after that in the 1600s Boston became known for the Puritan movement, the imprisonment of the Pilgrim Fathers prior to their journey across to Boston, America.

Kayla Jones 05:16

Fun fact, Boston and Massachusetts was named after Boston in Lincolnshire by Isaac Johnson and John Cotton, locals who emigrated to New England in the 1630s.

Katy 05:27

So a lot of those historic characters originated from Boston. So we’ve got such a lot of history and heritage in the town. We’re so close to the sea, but we’re also an area of agricultural land, and a lot of people know Lincolnshire as being the greengrocer of the UK. So a lot of the vegetables you may see in a supermarket will have come from this area, surrounded by fields of cabbages and broccoli and all sorts of different vegetables, potatoes that are grown in Boston and in the Fens.

Kayla Jones 06:05

Like many Big Local areas, Boston has had its ups and downs. What was evident in my chat with Katy, however, was the resilience of the people of Boston to come together even when things feel fractured. One of those times began, as many good stories do in a pub.

Katy 06:23

You’re probably not going to believe this, but it started in a pub, in a pub quiz, like all good stories should I think. So there was a question about one of the colours of the Monopoly board, and our chair and another of the residents was in one of the pub teams, and they quickly started to think about if a Monopoly game was to be focused on Boston, what would go on the board? They pitched the idea to the rest of the resident board, and it was a roughly 50/50 split. There was interest, and then there wasn’t. So what we do with all of our projects, we took it out to the community. We posted some questions on Facebook and social media to see what the interest would be if we were to investigate doing a Boston game.

Kayla Jones 07:11

The resident board then went out into the community, put out feelers on Facebook and social media to see how the local area felt about having their very own Monopoly board. Like Marmite, Katy reckons it’s a game you either love or hate. 

Katy 07:25

We got quite a mixture of feedback in terms of, ​“oh no, it always ends in conflict”, to actually, no, ​“that would be great.” And that’s where it kind of started. So we worked really closely with a company called Winning Moves, which is the specialist arm of Hasbro, which is the Monopoly makers. And they support towns and cities to do their own board. So we took their guidance throughout. What we wanted to do was highlight the really good bits of Boston and showcase what we are proud of in our area. So instead of having streets, we had themes. So each colour had a theme. So there were heritage buildings, there were entertainment venues, there were outdoor spaces, there was education, we got some quite historic shopping lanes, so we focused on that. Some of the imagery of the historic buildings that are in the town, on the money, literally anything that could be changed, we changed. We kept it a secret. We didn’t let anybody really know until we got confirmation of the delivery date, which was just a couple of weeks before Christmas back in 2021.

Kayla Jones 08:43

Oh no. It dawned on me while I was speaking with Katy, this wasn’t the most sociable of times for communities.

Katy 08:50

And we had an advertisement on the big billboard in town four weeks before, and then did a lot of publicity, and it just went crazy just before Christmas. It was totally mad, but it was just wonderful. It was so many positive comments.

Kayla Jones 09:07

Boston Monopoly boards completely sold out two weeks before Christmas.

Katy 09:12

It wasn’t just about promoting the town. We purchased the games and then we gave them to about 12 local community groups and organisations for them to sell. So it was an alternative way of them getting funding. So everything, every game that they sold, they kept 100% of the money. So obviously, it generated interest. They generated, depending on the size of the organisation, between sort of £3,000 and £6,000, which they then were able to utilise in their own way. So one of the buildings in town has a room, a couple of rooms, where they do arts exhibitions. And so what they wanted was lighting and the necessary equipment to exhibit art appropriately. Another group bought some CCTV, so it helped them generate funding. It was obviously during the pandemic, so it was quite a difficult time for some groups to generate …. they wouldn’t be able to have their traditional fundraising activity. So it gave the town a lift. Definitely gave the town a lift at the time.

Kayla Jones 10:20

Despite so many residents being apart and physically unable to go out and about in Boston, people were able to learn about the historical sites and landmarks of the local area through playing Monopoly. Even in times of war, uncertainty and economic depression, people have still partaken in a bit of game play to lift moods, create connection and have fun together. During the difficult times of the pandemic that’s exactly what Boston did. 

Katy 10:45

I think it was just such a difficult time for many organisations and individuals and volunteers and the people that they were supporting. Equally, the town itself does get quite a bit of negative press due to some of the tensions between the communities, and sometimes on a political level as well. So it was just nice to see people come together from different communities and look and point out areas on the board where their children go to that school, or they work in that area, and or didn’t realise that existed or that that park was there. So it was, it was nice to definitely bring people together to talk about Boston in a positive light.

Kayla Jones 11:30

Another game, Trumps cards, proved also quite popular for the local area.

Katy 11:35

The Trumps cards were quite interesting. This, again, was another of the projects that our Chair led on and Richard Tory, who is our Chair, decided he would look into the heritage of the town area and looked at how many listed buildings we actually had got in our Boston Big Local area, because our area is very much the town centre. He quickly came back to us and said, ​“we’ve actually got, I think, 268 listed buildings in the Boston Big Local area”, which we were all really surprised about. So Richard worked really closely with the Boston Preservation Trust, which is a historic organisation that’s based in the town centre.

Kayla Jones 12:16

On the Trumps cards were links to different parts of Boston’s history. The Trumps cards were a unique way for locals to know a bit more about some of the buildings they perhaps pass in their day-to-day lives, or might not be accessible anymore.

Katy 12:28

But actually, it’s been really interesting to sort of know a little bit more about that side of the heritage side of Boston. Now, what we’ve also done as part of that is within each of the Trumps cards, it’s a small QR code which people can scan, and we’ve put a number of the cards, well, all of the cards are split into four small walks, so people can QR code it, get the walks up, follow the cards around, and then learn about the facts at that same time. And one of the groups that we’ve supported is the Boston history tours as well, and she utilises the Trumps card as part of her tours, both with the general public, but also with the local schools. So it brings the younger generation in, most of the younger generation, they come from such a diverse range of countries as well, so they get to learn a bit more about where they’re living. I think it makes some of the buildings seem more accessible to people. 

Kayla Jones 13:22

The visibility of these historic sites and local landmarks also helped to bring visibility to local businesses inhabiting some of these sites and to the Big Local resident board who were involved in the games to be a voice for locals on panels and various projects. Having physical spaces to explore the past, memorialise events through murals or memorials, and residents involved in preservation and conservation is a big way that many Big Local areas express pride in where they live. Local Trust’s Matt Leach, who’s visited all 150 areas, has seen the ways that heritage sites such as the one connected with industrial history have impacted communities for centuries, right through to today. Through Big Local funding, Big Local areas use new knowledge to create long-term plans for memorials or tourism sites.

Matt Leach 14:09

So Cresswell, Ellington, Lynemouth and Linton, which is in the far North East, where the Big Local was fundamental to kick-starting the renovation of a Peel tower, so a 14th century tower created to protect local people against raiders from Scotland back in the day. And a bunch of stones across the road from a bungalow of a community-based archeologist called Barry, who is a remarkable person. You can find a lot more about him on our website, and he was obsessed with this place. And, you know, it’s a place where local kids, probably for generations before, had gone to drink and do other things of an evening out of sight of their parents. But there was something about it, and what it was, and what it could be. And it turned out it was this remarkable, remarkably well-preserved example of a type of building that was at one time quite common across the North East, to renovate it, to put a roof on it, to turn it into a visitor attraction with a largely volunteer workforce welcoming huge numbers of people coming as tourists into the area. It’s a very beautiful bit of the North East.

Kayla Jones 15:18

A 45 minute drive from Newcastle, the Northumberland heritage site grew from research into a tower to the excavation of a medieval walled garden, through additional funding, that locals and tourists can now visit alongside the tower.

Matt Leach 15:31

Then more money’s come in from heritage funders to help recreate, to excavate and recreate that garden as well. So you’ve gone from a community which, you know largely, some reasonably deprived mining villages in a beautiful bit of the world, to the community which has this incredible heritage asset. And Big Local funding helped mobilise local people and other funders to make a fantastic difference.

Kayla Jones 15:55

In a research article entitled ​‘Designs on the past from Local Trust’, by Kerry Newsome, she explores the ways history can have an impact on hard-pressed communities such as Boston. What she found was that in each of these communities, whilst residents rarely spoke in one shared voice, all of them wanted to highlight local history to boost community pride in their area. There was a mixture of inward and outward-facing initiatives for economic and tourism purposes, where these communities both fostered a sense of shared identity. They struck a balance between honouring connections to the past to build a shared community identity and continuously evolving through new projects, ensuring that the community story reflects its diverse, multi-generational character today.

Matt Leach 16:38

So what people want to feel is a sense that their identity carries worth, that it’s important, and of course it is. And I think community pride is often tied up in that. How do you feel about the place in which you live? Do you feel it’s a good thing in itself? Do you feel that other people value it and respect it? And what does that mean for then, how you feel as a person and when you go to communities which perhaps have become atomised, which have lost the things that used to drive pride, whether it was community organisations or trade unions or the factory down the road or, you know, the incredibly well-tended park. When they’ve lost that stuff, there’s a need to think about how we can replace it, how we can find other anchors that give people a sense that their identity is validated, that they live lives that are you know, that have that embedded connection to things that they can rightly feel give them status as well.

Kayla Jones 17:40

This connection and identity of the past with the present in communities was seen in a very tangible way for Boston Big Local in a project that’s continuing after Big Local has wrapped up.

Katy 17:51

It’s called Boston Story in Stitch, so the concept was sold to the residents as a bit like a biotapestry of Boston history. That’s grown because they started it just before the pandemic. So one of the books that they’ve done, they’ve done six books which are about a metre wide, full of embroidered pages, and it sort of sums up Boston Big Local really, because it’s of all the really positive things that are in the town. So the sporting groups, the community groups, the history, the heritage, the sort of the agricultural side of things.

Kayla Jones 18:26

The Boston Stitchers, as they’re called, sketched a book out to be filled with colourful, vibrant, embroidered pages all about Boston’s story of the past and the present, with participants of all ages getting involved.

Katy 18:38

And what they have done is, the youngest person to make a square was four years old, and the oldest is in her late 80s. And it really is just a project that brings all members of the community together, because it’s just been, I don’t think we ever could envisage it would become as big as it has. And it is just such a lovely, lovely piece. It really is.

Kayla Jones 19:05

The Story and Stitch project embodies the deep pride that local communities often feel for their past. It’s an exploration of history, a connection among today’s community members, and a bridge to future generations, all intricately woven together into one ongoing, inclusive story.

Katy 19:22

I think there’s a lot more that we would have wanted to have achieved, but I think the realisation is that we have achieved a lot within the 10 years, and the backdrop has changed. So politically, things have changed. We’re a very different town to what we were 10 years ago. We’ve got a very, very strong voluntary sector, very strong community sector. So from my experience, I think when push comes to the shove and people need to, they want to come together to do something, they will, and Boston’s very good at that. We have never lacked community spirit. It sometimes is quite fractured, but the community spirit is strong, and it always has been.

Kayla Jones 20:07

Like many other Big Local communities, Boston’s journey hasn’t always been smooth sailing, and residents won’t always see eye to eye on which stories to highlight. As the area grows and evolves, so does the perspective the community has on themselves, changing how they define the connections around them. For Boston, Katy is proud that their community has come together to create projects which reflect the area’s unique identity in a way that is distinctly their own, expanding Boston’s story so that new residents and future generations can learn about it. Many Big Local areas showcase their community pride by honouring their pasts. With Big Local funding, they’ve been able to transform local sites into tourist attractions, commemorate historic industries with plaques and memorials, and engage new residents and future generations by weaving together the rich story of their community, a journey that continues to this day. Some big ideas have grown out of Big Local communities, but Boston is a fantastic reminder that sometimes the best way to start is by going with something we know and love, something as simple as coming together, like many ancient communities before us, and playing a game. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Community Pride podcast. For more information and resources on community heritage and Big Local as a programme, go to learningfrombiglocal.org.uk