Living the High Life: Tower Block UK Travelling Micro Museum

Tower Block UK has created an accessible record of UK multi-storey social housing through a openly accessible and searchable online database. As part of the public engagement programme for this project, Tower Block UK have also created a travelling micro museum, in order to bring this story to as wide an audience as possible in an innovative, accessible, and engaging way while further promoting the use of the database at local level through the collection of oral memories, photographs and ephemera for specific sites. In doing so, the project will promote the social and architectural significance of post-war housing; challenging negative assumptions that prevail about life in high rise blocks and presenting them instead as vanishing heritage worthy of documentation. The travelling museum has a strong focus upon interaction, including a tablet, slide-reader, and hand-held scanner. It also offers versatility, as the material within the museum can be changed used copies of photographs, newspaper articles and maps from the Tower Block archive, depending on the location of the exhibition, to more actively reflect the interests of those engaging with the contents.