Heritage Detectives
Arvon commissioned four exciting and thoughtful projects exploring Lumb Bank’s heritage in creative, collaborative and unexpected ways.
Each project investigated a different aspect of the site’s history, landscape and cultural significance, culminating in a public sharing. Together, these projects reflect the richness of Lumb Bank itself – a place shaped by people, industry, nature and imagination.
Below, you can look back on each project and explore the material, findings and output they produced.
Resonant Landscapes | Katie Chatburn & Simon East
Composer and academic Katie Chatburn and creative technologist Simon East led an immersive, sound-based workshop exploring how we connect to place through listening. Their project, ‘Resonant Landscapes’, invited participants to engage with Lumb Bank and its surroundings through sound recording and interactive technology, gathering sounds from across the house and landscape using tools including hydrophones and contact microphones. Together they captured the unheard sounds of Lumb, from the sap in the trees to the water beneath and the unexplained white noise in the ether. Participants came from the Basement Recovery project in Halifax, an organisation supporting people with alcohol and substance abuse issues.
Living History at Lumb Bank | Paul Knights
Environmental educator and writer Paul Knights explored Lumb Bank’s natural environment as a form of living history. Working with the Friends of Colden Clough, participants took part in two guided walking workshops combining ecological observation with historical research, investigating how farming, quarrying, milling and conservation have shaped the biodiversity of the valley we see today. From ancient woodland and recovering ecosystems to the traces of historic land use embedded in fields and plant life, archival maps and photographs were used alongside on-the-ground observation to connect past and present through the landscape itself. The guided research walk peeled back the layers of the landscape, uncovering the history all around us.
Click here for the online self-guided heritage trail.
Read more about all the stops on the walk, including photographs and historical maps here.
Lumb Bank’s Lost Women | Angela Clare
Historian and writer Angela Clare led this social history project, uncovering and reimagining the lives of women connected to Lumb Bank across its many pasts — as a farm, millowner’s house, ranch, mink farm and tearoom. Working collaboratively, participants investigated archival traces and gaps relating to the women who lived and worked there, responding through creative writing including poetry, scripts and narrative non-fiction. Recognising that many women’s stories are absent from official records, the project embraced both research and imagination, conjuring the lives of the ordinary women who lived and worked in the Calder Valley over the centuries through verse, song, story and performance. The research and the writing will be hosted on our website.
Explore the research and the writing: Lumb Bank’s Lost Women
Stories in Sound and Film | Danny Hardaker & Sally Molineaux
Filmmakers Danny Hardaker and Sally Molineaux explored Lumb Bank through film and audio, focusing on the relationship between creativity and the natural environment. They gathered stories connected to Lumb Bank, from personal memories to oral histories and reimagined narratives, weaving these voices together with cinematic footage of the landscape and recorded soundscapes. Combining interviews, ambient sound and visual storytelling, the resulting film summoned the essence of Lumb using exquisite drone footage and audio from the people who work and create there. The project captures both the visible and invisible qualities of Lumb Bank; its atmosphere, its rhythms and its enduring connection to creative practice.
This project was made possible with The National Lottery Heritage Fund.
