As part of St Peter’s 200 anniversary celebrations, we wanted to discover, capture and share forgotten and untold stories about the church from across generations, with a particular focus on working class histories. Our goal was to show the connections between people and place and create new ones as we conducted the project.

The idea to produce a film, One Moment in Time: Celebrating of 200 years of St Peter’s, Brighton’s unofficial cathedral, was born.

As we delved into the history of St Peter’s and its impact on the community around it, it was important to us to including a range of people in the project.

Across the four weeks, it was fantastic to meet more than 20 students from The Met, Varndean, BHASVIC and Spear, most of whom had never been in the church building before, and to work together with the production team to interview older people with fascinating stories to tell about the church.

A key element was fostering connections between generations. The students had an opportunity to spend time with our storytellers and to learn from an older generation what it was like to be involved in the church and live in a bygone era, as well as understand why it was important to document their stories.

In four, day-long sessions led by Fruit Media film producers and project managers and assisted by a journalist and church volunteers, we filmed seven storytellers from a range of backgrounds, including shop assistants, a secretary, and a printer. The workshops covered pre-production panning, interviewing, set-up, audio and filming, and editing, and resulted in the creation of three short films, which you can see here [include links].

Impact

This is some of the feedback we received from our participants: “I liked the fact that the facilitators were industry professionals using industry standard equipment etc, it meant that what we learned would be useful for future reference.”

“I was here as a learning support assistant with a student. The level of engagement was wonderful, the students were incredible. The tutors leading the group were very informative and patient and imparted excellent specialist knowledge.”

Funding

This project is kindly funded by Historic England as part of the Everyday Heritage – Working Class Histories grant. We are extremely grateful to them for this funding.