Animating Halton’s Heritage – Memories of Widnes Market

Animating Halton’s Heritage – Project overview

Digital Arts Box CIC, in partnership with Halton Libraries and Widnes Market, have been hard at work creating an animation to bring historical stories about trades in Halton to life.

Based on the theme of Pioneers and Trailblazers for Halton’s Borough of Culture award for 2021, our focus was on Halton’s rich cultural history in trade and industry.

Our staff have worked with local people from Halton to facilitate research sessions, as well as teaching them how to plan, storyboard and animate their own videos. 

Working together with the local community to create an animation that brings to life local stories of cultural careers in Halton, with a focus on the historic Widnes Market.

Learn more about the how Digital Arts Box CIC tackled this creative endeavour in this project explanation and breakdown video:

The Animation – Memories of Widnes Market

The purpose of our animation is to produce an entertaining and informative way for people to learn more about local historical careers and jobs from Halton. The animation has been created using historical archive material and photographs of Halton, provided by Halton Libraries and the public, to create a fantastic animated film based on Widnes Market’s past.

You can view and share the finished animation for free here:

We’d love to hear what you think of the animation and for you to keep sharing your memories of the old Widnes Market in the comments section.

More about the Animating Halton’s Heritage Project:

The project ran from April 2022 – September 2022. During this time, we ran a series of open research sessions at Widnes Library. In these research sessions we interviewed members of the local commuity to discover stories and unearth memories of the old Widnes market, with it’s opening date going back almost 150 years ago. We backed up these stories by looking at historic newspaper articles using the Library’s microfilm facility. 

We also ran a series of community animation sessions at Widnes Library and Widnes Market. These sessions allowed residents of Halton to get hands on experience of creating their own stopmotion animations, utilising similar techniques to those you see in the final film.

During these sessions we also tasked residents of Halton with creating characters which can be seen in the final film. 

With hours of research and a catalogue of materials and photos, we then turned to local animator Cath Garvey. We worked alongside Cath, who did a fantastic job of melding all of our information and ideas into the visual treat that is the final animation – “Memories of Widnes Market”

Project Funders and Partners

This project is made possible with funding from the Celebrating Halton’s Heritage project as a community grant with thanks to The National Lottery Heritage Fund and Halton Borough Council.

This project would not have been possible with help and support from the following organisations: