‘Anglia Square: A Love Story’ is a year-long project supported by funding from the National Heritage Lottery Fund, launched in December 2018 by The Common Lot. The project celebrates the heritage and diversity of the community around Anglia Square as plans to redevelop this iconic part of Norwich have been referred to national government.
Norwich-based theatre company, The Common Lot, are using their ‘research, respond and realise’ approach which created the award-winning ‘Come Yew In’ in 2017 and hugely successful ‘All Mouth, No Trousers: Telling Tales of Radical Norfolk Women’/Rosie’s Plaques in 2018. A team of 40 volunteers, working with researchers at Anglia Ruskin University, have explored three areas of the heritage of Anglia Square. These include the long history of the area from the earliest settlement to the bombing in WW2, the planning decisions of the 1960s that led to the current development and the recording of oral testimony of those who have lived and worked there over the last 50 years.
Creative responses to this heritage gathered by our citizen researchers range from traditional prints and imagined postcards to plasticine geological models and photographs. The heritage has also been realised as songs and a script which will be performed by a cast of 24 and the ‘Stump Cross Singers’ choir in the centre of Norwich, starting at the Garth (behind St Andrew’s Hall) and concluding in Anglia Square itself. The audience travelling from the second stage at St George’s Green, will be able to discover performance spots on the street and in courtyards on their way to Anglia Square.
Images found and created during the project will be displayed in the windows of shops and businesses in the performance area from the end of June.
The project is also enabling historical work with five local schools, using visual art and performance. Students from these schools are exhibiting their work and taking part in the ‘performance spots’.
In the autumn, The Common Lot will also publish a songbook and heritage publication.
Explore our website to learn more about the project activity so far…