Now live in the Swale Estuary region
For more information, visit our website: Swale Estuary | CiM Coasts in Mind is a pioneering project from MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology), made possible by a grant from The National Lottery Heritage Fund and Lloyd’s Register Foundation. Over the course of the next three years, this new citizen science project will map a century of change along some of the country’s most vulnerable coastlines.
From the Isle of Sheppey and Sittingbourne through Faversham to Whitstable, this historic coast has played pivotal roles on the national and international stage throughout the ages. A designated Site of Special Interest (SSSI), the saltmarshes and mudflats of the Swale Estuary also support a high diversity of plants and invertebrates as well as overwintering and breeding birds.
The local project team will be working with communities to collect oral histories, old photographs, postcards and diaries which highlight changes to local cultural practices and livelihoods built around the coastal environment as well as the historic and natural landscape itself. They will be delivering a series of free training, creative, memory and wellbeing events alongside local partners. These will explore the region’s compelling tapestry of stories ranging from the prehistoric use of the waterways and Roman occupation to sailing barges serving local industry, wartime defences and shellfish collecting.
The project will celebrate local knowledge and memory, helping to illustrate important local changes, sea level rise, increasing tidal action and worsening storm events. These collected stories and images will be used to co-create an online archive with community groups which will be made publicly available for the public, local policy makers and researchers to engage with.
If you would like to be involved or have pictures/ stories to share, please email the team at hfarmer@mola.org.uk and gconium@mola.org.uk
Follow the project on the Coasts in Mind Facebook page.
