Updated News - Women and Leisure during the First World War – ‘An Essential Part of National Work’
Home Front storytelling in hard to reach places
In January 2019 the Women and Leisure during the First World War exhibition was taken down from its final venue at Newcastle Central Library. It has been exhibited continuously in venues across Tyne and Wear and Northern Ireland since October 2017 and I’ve accompanied it on almost all of its travels.
There is lots to say about this exhibition in general but a key point is that it brims with research findings that were produced by community researchers from the North East... and it was then exhibited in those same communities. We were really pleased that our exhibition visited some "big" venues (Ulster Museum in Belfast, St Mary's Heritage Centre in Gateshead), but museums are particular destinations: we arrive there on detours from everyday life with free time to spend and with our concerns on the back burner. 
We were equally pleased that the exhibition was seen in some very different spaces, although they were not exactly "destinations" our aim here was to exhibit at those fleetingly visited waypoints on the daily routes that people follow in order to hold their lives together. Our rationale was that if an exhibition is to have the best possibility of being encountered by the community, it needs to go on that route somewhere.
