BRISTOL
BLITZED
This exciting one day workshop for Year 5 pupils from Hillcrest Primary School took place at Castle Park Bristol Industrial Museum, to mark the launch of a new resource on WW2 buildings: Bristol Blitzed.
The pupils, who wore wearing 1940’s costume, took part in a one hour activity challenge on Castle Park, where they had to navigate old 1940’s street maps and interview a range of 1940’s characters to find the locations of various important buildings that were destroyed during the Blitz.
The session enabled the pupils to gain an insight into what the Castle Park area of Bristol was like before the Blitz – a bustling shopping and entertainment centre of narrow streets and tall densely packed buildings and discover some of the characters that might have been living, working and shopping there.
The pupils then returned to the Industrial Museum to have tea, cake and conversation with the Architecture Panel - older residents of the city who lived through the Blitz and whose memories of the city are included in the Bristol Blitzed resource. This session gave the children a rare opportunity to question the Architecture panel about what life and Bristol were like during the challenging war years.
Organised
by the Bristol Museums, libraries and Archives and the Architecture
Centre, Bristol, the event gave the pupils who had been learning about
WW2 in their history lessons, an engaging, lively and three dimensional
learning experience which reinforced some of the work they had been
doing in the classroom. It helped them to understand the impact of the
war on real, ordinary Bristolians and the built environment of the city,
which changed so dramatically as a result of the bombing raids.
The new Bristol Blitzed resource was developed by the Education teams at the Architecture Centre and the Industrial Museum and comprises of an ‘Architectural walking tour of WW2 Bristol as remembered by residents of the city’ - a leaflet including old photographs from the Bristol Records Office. It is accompanied by a website www.bristolblitzed.org
The schools day was one of a range of activities, included a guided walking tour led by local Architectural Historian, Andy Foyle, used to launch the resource during Architecture Week 2006.