AN EXHIBITION is telling the stories of the inhabitants of the Oxford Road in a new collaboration between LifeSpring Church and Baker Street Productions.
LifeSpring Stories – an Oxford Road project has opened at the Turbine House Riverside Museum at Blake’s Lock, and will soon move to the church’s Pavillion building.
The project looks at the stories members who attended a range of groups at LifeSpring church, which hosts groups for addiction recovery, refugees, learning English, and even social clubs.
It consists of a collection of portraits and images displayed in an exhibition, with each featuring a QR code which links to an audio telling of the given story.
The stories were released as a podcast series to accompany the exhibition.
The exhibition was commissioned as part of the continuing High Street Heritage Action Zone, a Historic England initiative which works with Reading Borough Council and community groups to stimulate economic growth and improve quality of life.
Jackie Jackson, community and cafe team leader at LifeSpring, said that the church’s status as a hub led to them being approached by Baker Street Productions.
“Caroline and Ollie from Baker Street Productions came along and said they wanted to produce a piece of artwork that told the stories of people who live, work, and belong on the road.
“The researchers came in and met with different people to hear their stories, people from lots of different cultures – some from the UK, some not, some who’ve lived in Reading all their lives, and they’ve got interesting stories.”
Ms Jackson said: “With us as a church, we’ve probably got between 30 and 40 different nationalities, and it definitely enriches quality of life.
“So I really loved the way people responded, since you don’t know how people are going to respond.
“But it was just that sense of value that it gave people that I really liked.”
Kat Holmes, one of the writers who worked with Baker Street Productions to compile the stories, said that the company poured through weeks of collected material.
“We interviewed loads of people and spent a really long time getting to know them, Alice and Robin who are PhD researchers and part of the council they went in and did weeks of background stuff.
“There are people with addiction issues, people who are pillars of the community, and even just people who dropped in for a cup of tea.”
Team members at Baker Street Productions took raw interview recordings and transcribed them, before editing them down into a spoken monologue.
“There was no scripting, no prompting,” says Ms Holmes, “The people just spoke to us and then we put it together in a format that would make sense.”
One of the stories the project follows an anonymous volunteer who is originally from Pakistan, and whose voice was disguised.
Ms Holmes said of her: “She helps women escape abusive marriages, and really focuses on like uplifting Asian women.
“She’s helped a woman that as pregnant whose husband said that if she had a girl, he would kill them both, and the volunteer got her out of the situation, got her into hospital, put her in a place where she could be safeguarded.”
She also spoke of Ernesto: “Who had to flee El Salvador because of gangs, who were telling him he owed them ‘la Renta.’
“So he made the really long, difficult journey getting here, bundled from hostel to hostel, but he’s also a woodwork artist.
“Now that he’s here, he wants to help people learn to do woodwork, and helped one of our other participants, Elsy, when she first arrived from Honduras.”
LifeSpring Stories exhibition is showing at the Riverside Museum, Blake’s Lock, Kenavon Drive, from 10am-6pm until Monday, September 5.
The exhibition will then move to the Pavillion building, where LifeSpring Church operates, on Oxford Road, open from 10am-2pm from Tuesday-Saturday, September 13-17.
