Working alongside adults with and without additional needs, we used ipads to capture images of the estate, and held conversations with long-term local residents to gather stories about how the estate has changed since its creation in the 1950s.

Karis Harrington represented the ambitions of the Kilsby Theatre Boat Project.  She started with the digital images of the neighbourhood captured by the adults at Parasol, and the nuggets of oral history from the local residents, and using her artistic wizardry combined stories of the past and present into really exciting festive artworks that delight the eye!

In the design above, you can see local resident Frank's dad, a butcher, "Early 1939 John Edward Chesman arrived in Oxford by bicycle from Grimsby, a distance of 168 miles in 2 days. Travelling with my uncle they slept overnight under a bridge, they were woken by police suspecting them of being part of the IRA S-campaign".  

Below you can see a design in which she took a photo of the present day parade of shops and changed most of the shop fronts to represent those that residents Frank and Pam told us were on the parade in the 1960s.....

Karis overlaid photos we took with her own talents as an illustrator and showed us the potency of art and imagination as a medium through which we can access and find joy in heritage…

Thanks go to everyone at the Parasol Project, Northway residents Frank, Pam and Pat, and Councillor Barbara Coyne for making this project happen, and of course the funders at OCVA, CFO and OCC.