Heritage Pathways

Research and Education Collaboration, 2025

Heritage Pathways was a collaborative research project led by Dr Johnathan Djabarouti at Manchester School of Architecture (MSA), exploring how heritage is experienced through movement, memory and everyday life. I was invited to contribute to the project as a creative practitioner, working with Johnathan to develop a workshop for young people in Castlefield that explored the area through walking, making and observation.

Castlefield is a vibrant conservation area where Manchester’s Roman, industrial and contemporary histories come together. Ruins, canals, cotton warehouses and railway infrastructure sit alongside museums, homes, bars, restaurants, an outdoor music venue and a ‘garden in the sky’, creating a place where heritage is not just preserved but lived, remembered and continually renewed. Rather than understanding heritage simply through buildings and monuments, Heritage Pathways asked how people experience historic places as they move through them, and how memories, stories and everyday routes contribute to a sense of belonging.

The workshop was hosted on site, in the National Trust’s Castlefield Viaduct, a garden located on a former Victorian railway viaduct. Designed in three parts, we spent the first hour discussing what existing memories people had of Castlefield, using a scale model of the site to make new additions in LEGO. The next few hours were spent walking and looking more closely at the details of the historic environment. Along the route we made rubbings from surfaces and architectural details, creating a tactile record of the places we encountered, and made urban sketches of scenes which interested us. Back at the viaduct we collated the new information and edited the propositional model to include our tactile observations made while moving through the context, discussing our findings and summarising our experiences.

During the final section of the day, we connected the participants with students from MSA, who shared their own architectural proposals for the area, creating an opportunity to see how young architects interpret places and develop ideas.