Arts trail will celebrate town's LGBTQ+ history

Young creative people are being invited to help make a new multimedia heritage trail around their town.

The project in King's Lynn, Norfolk, will explore the town's LGBTQ+ history,

It is being organised by arts collective Collusion with funding from the Arts Council and Historic England.

The project will be a result in an augmented reality (AR) tour of King's Lynn, featuring digital art works created by local artists.

Assistant producer Rosa Torr said the project team was looking for people aged between 16 and 30 with interests in animation, poetry, games design and street arts to get involved.

"AR trails are a really cool way of enlivening town centres," she said.

"Pokémon Go tends to be a good way to understand it. It's using phones and software to present new creative installations for people to enjoy."

Announcing the project on their website, Historic England said: "Young people will create an AR trail through King's Lynn centre exploring the queer histories of the town that will connect to a new artwork.

"What form this artwork takes will be in the hands of the young people."

The project has faced criticism from Neil Record, former director of National Trust pressure group Restore Trust, who said public funding of the trail was "highly inappropriate".

Ms Torr said the criticism was a shame.

"The internet is a strange place. It's really disappointing to see that some people have interpreted this as a negative; as something that is 'woke'," she said.

The trail will be created through a series of workshops, ready for King's Lynn Pride in August.

Among those offering support will be author and academic Diarmuid Hester, whose audio-based tour of Cambridge looks at the city's impact on queer writers including Edward Carpenter, E.M. Forster and Ali Smith.

Ms Torr said the project would be working with the borough archives as well as uncovering more contemporary connections.

"There often isn't that much in the records that documents people from the queer community but, of course, they've always been in King's Lynn and this project is about uncovering those stories," she said.

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