Discovery Nights: Going Underground
Discovery Museum’s next after-hours event for adults, Discovery Nights: Going Underground is on Friday 10 October from 6pm – 9pm.
The theme Going Underground is inspired by the region’s mining heritage while bringing forward the folk traditions of people in the coal communities like proggy mat making, grassroots activism and even ghost stories. The evening will consist of hands-on crafts, activities, talks, historical objects and archives, bar and food.
In Discovery Nights: Going Underground visitors will have a chance to meet North East artist Bob Olley, a former miner who was the last on shift at Whitburn Colliery when it closed in 1968. Using images of his mining series as inspiration Bob will share his first-hand anecdotes of the brutality and humour of life underground and bearing witness to the violent Orgreave riots during the Miner’s Strikes of the mid-1980s.
Activities on offer also include writer Stephanie Lyttle leading poetry workshops inspired by Tyne & Wear Archives material; storyteller Justine Boussard, aka the Amateur Ancestor telling the Story of the Whale and the Steam Engine, and historian Henrietta Heald will deliver short talks on Newcastle’s trailblazing engineers Charles Parsons and Lord Armstrong.
Roving storytellers The Moss Troopers will tell ghoulish ghost stories from the coal age and people can try their hands at proggy mat making with a Woodhorn Museum expert, make protest badges, or handle historical objects related to the ages of steam and coal.
