Hello! Thank you for popping by to find out about our project and how you can help us make it a reality.
We are a group of 5 Community Curators: people like you, who live in Cambridge and want to find out about the stories of this fascinating city. With the help of the Museum of Cambridge, we have been coming up with ideas to explore some of your local stories to be incorporated in an exhibition, which we will launch at the end of August at the museum.
This is part of Museum Making, an exciting project by which we want to involve the local community in answering the big questions about what it means to live in Cambridge and how the museum can represent its local community better, amongst many other things.
We came up with the idea to explore spaces in the city. These spaces can be real or imagined, for example a park, a pub, an area or a building that was demolished and only exists in memory. And we want to think about them as belonging to either Town, Gown, or even perhaps neither or both.
What is Town and Gown, I hear you ask? Well, they are informal ways of referring to the non-academic population, and the academic population in Cambridge, respectively. Town’s people are generally thought of as traders, health workers, teachers, museum professionals, artists, but also cooks, cleaners, and others who work for the university. Whereas Gown people are those who are related to the University: students, professors, and researchers mostly.
Through a short survey we want to ask if Cambridge and its spaces really are so divided?
Or might there be people who feel they are Town, but also Gown? Or, perhaps, some people that are neither? Where do they feel they belong to, in that case?
We want to find out more about the spaces in our city that are thought of as either Town or Gown, and how they are used by the people that live in Cambridge.
And to understand this and get to the bottom of the question, we need your stories!
You can help us by filling in this short questionnaire: shorturl.at/acqR5
Once we have collected enough responses, we will carefully read them and select some of your responses for display in the upcoming exhibition. Although all responses will inform our research, and hence will be an invaluable contribution to this project, only some of them will be quoted and shown in the final display.
We can’t wait to hear what you have to say!
You have time to respond to this survey until the 6th of August.
If you have any questions, please email us on enquiries@museumofcambridge.org.uk and to hear more about our Museum Making project and exhibitions check out our website or subscribe to our mailing list
This project wouldn’t be possible without the help of our funders: thank you National Lottery Heritage Fund and Cambridge City Council for supporting this work.