Invisible Worlds: Place-Making, Augmented Reality, and Alderley Edge

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Invisible Worlds brings together digital and creative responses to explore contemporary and historical place-making strategies, drawing on the opportunities offered by Augmented Reality (AR). An academic collaboration with the National Trust, it takes as its focus Alderley Edge, an outdoor (non-built) heritage site in North-East Cheshire, above a network of Bronze and Roman Age mines. Alderley Edge has a long and rich legendary history, which is, however, largely invisible to the majority of visitors to the site today. The project is led by an interdisciplinary team of researchers in the Department of English Literature at the University of Birmingham, the Institute of Historical Research, London, and the Department of Media Studies at the University of Lincoln; as well as creative practitioners working with visual media, soundscapes and storytelling. It has been developed through a series of scoping meetings from May 2018 to April 2019 with the National Trust, in direct response to urgent challenges identified by the Trust. It also builds on established relationships with key stakeholders in the Edge and its legend, including the author Alan Garner, the Cheshire educational and heritage charity, the Blacken Trust (founded by Alan and Griselda Garner), and Derbyshire Caving Club, who manage the mines at Alderley Edge under license from the National Trust. A digital humanities project engaged with the relationship between contemporary experiences of place and medieval legendary narratives, Invisible Worlds charts a new course in Medieval Studies, the Digital Humanities, and Heritage. It offers a new model for the study of trans-historical place-making, approaching the ways in which long histories of place interact with contemporary experiences of lived space. Invisible Worlds takes as its focus the legend of Alderley Edge: a subterranean chamber of sleeping heroes, beneath the site, who will awaken at a time of national crisis. In long-lived regional circulation, the modern legend has affinities to medieval sources which have informed later medievalist practices associated with the site, including its treatment in the novels of Alan Garner. Garner has advised on the development of the project, and is a key member of the project's advisory board.The project will make the subterranean legend of the Edge accessible through an AR resource, using immersive 3D software, Unity 3D (accessed via smart phone or tablet). The resource localises commissioned artistic responses to long historical and contemporary versions of the legend in 3D representations of the mines beneath the site, viewed from above ground. It will also be accessible remotely, through the project website, hosted at the University of Birmingham. The experience of the Edge as lived place, as much as a site of historical importance, is fundamental to Invisible Worlds. A public survey, inviting new responses to the legend of the Edge, will be integrated within the AR resource and website. This is positioned within the project as the latest chapter in the long history of legendary place-making, and forms the grounds of a new public history of the Edge, written by users of the resource rather than for them. Invisible Worlds has been developed as a case study, with extensible potential across heritage sites and organisations. It engages with the capacity of AR for the representation and analysis of imagined worlds, overlaid upon the geographical real, as a vital component in communicating new dynamic histories of non-built heritage, or sites with invisible, legendary or difficult histories. At Alderley Edge, the project will facilitate a new type of visitor experience and engagement, centring its legendary position and its cultural significance.