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THE HERITAGE COUNCIL is hosting workshop this week to teach communities how to create a pop-up museum in vacant spaces to inject life back into their towns and draw in the tourists.
Liam Mannix, who is a project manager at the council, told TheJournal.ie that “every town in the country, to a greater or lesser extent, has problems with these vacant spaces”.
“Having a pop-up museum fulfills a lot of roles – it hopefully bring life back into a town, spruces up the area and allows community groups to do something stable and sustainable,” he said. “You can spend maybe five or ten grand over a summer and the fact that it’s temporary is good because it’s exciting and you can do something different next year so it doesn’t become tired.”
Mannix commented that smaller towns with low populations often do not have a tourism office and a pop-up museum can serve as a “reception area” for tourists during the summer months.
This is not the first time people have been encouraged to make better use of vacant properties with Dublin City Council asking owners to let others use them for art installations and creative events last year.
Creating a pop-up museum can empower communities, Mannix explained, particularly for those who have lost their jobs.
At the course itself next week we have a fair few archaeologists and they’ve taken an unbelievable hit – over 80 per cent of them lost their jobs. Their core skill was excavation so we’re trying to expand on this, allowing them to do heritage interpretation, expand their skills base.
“People in communities have a lot of goodwill but not necessarily the training to do something like this so we give them the training and hopefully a small bit of funding too,” he said.
“It’s always a better result when communities do it themselves, they know what’s important in the town and what’s interesting and what makes it unique.”
The workshop will take place on 3 and 4 December in Newpark Hotel, Kilkenny and more details can be found on the Heritage Council website.
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Sandy sounds increasingly like my wife when she’s on the warpath!
It must get very windy in your house, does she blow hot or cold air?
Dept of Foreign Affairs is kind of late to the party with that advice. The east coast airports are closed. People couldn’t travel even of they wanted to.
The first paragraph does not make sense because you won’t be able to travel to the US. All flights are cancelled to the north east.
To be fair, the advice is also intended for people who aren’t necessarily travelling directly from Ireland.
Gavan, true but you can’t travel without the plane.
No, but like I said, if you’re not currently in Ireland and happened to be, say, elsewhere in the USA, perhaps you were intending to drive to the north-east?
People need to be told this? Anyone likely to look to see probably already has a fair idea of what’s going on there,
You’d be surprised (maybe not) at the stupidity of some people still.
Some still have to be told these things sadly.
Like the America packets of peanuts that has on the packets “Warning: Contains nuts” Loads of similar examples available).
Silly to state these things but sadly have to still be done because people can be stupid.
have your say