For the second year, the Diverse Heritage team at Scottish Civic Trust partnered with Scottish Refugee Council’s Guardianship Project for young refugees and Open Aye on My Place Photography workshops. My Place Photography is an annual Scotland-wide photography competition for school-age young people delivered by the Diverse Heritage team at Scottish Civic Trust, supported by Historic Environment Scotland and Jessops. The young people submit photographs of the built environment, encouraging them to look at the heritage in the places they live and develop an understanding of things around them through the medium of photography. From 2023, we secured additional funding specifically for My Place Workshops to support young people from refugee, asylum-seeking and migrant backgrounds.
The aim of this year’s workshops was to develop educational materials such as visual scavenger hunts for architectural elements to help the participants understand light, pattern, and texture, and historical context of buildings. The overarching theme of this year’s workshops is ‘Now and Then’ to encourage young refugees to think about the changing designs of historic buildings: when, why, for whom and by whom were they were modified for different time periods?; what do these buildings say about the time and place during which they were constructed?; what do they say about us now?
This month, the young people were taken to the UNESCO World Heritage Site, New Lanark for a participatory architectural photography . The site is a purpose-built 18th century mill village and is a glimpse into industrial history, showcasing preserved buildings and the use of natural resources with human machinery.