Helping local people map history in Telford
Cinderloo
In 1821 mine owners across the Dawley coalfields (in what is now Telford, Shropshire) agreed to collectively reduce miners’ pay. This sparked an uprising that lasted days and involved hundreds of women, children and men. Strikers and their families walked miles across the coalfields calling on miners and other workers to join the strike. In the end the uprising was ended following a bloody confrontation on the “Cinder Hills” vast slag heaps in what is now the centre of Telford.
Local papers reported it as Shropshire’s own Peterloo “Cinderloo” but since then the incident has been largely forgotten.
Telford community
A Telford based community group aims to bring this incident back to life for local people.
They asked us (Data Orchard CIC) to help them with some web mapping. Following an initial conversation we introduced them to two web-mapping tools.
Storymap
Storymap from the Knight Lab makes it easy to create an interactive visualisation based around different locations. This was perfect for Cinderloo because during the uprising strikers walked between different pits and iron works. Using Storymap the group were able to plot this journey on a modern map.
It really is fascinating to be able to relate the Telford of 200 years ago to the Telford of today in this way.
It’s a great tool, free to use and very straightforward. There are a few customisation options where it helps to know a little bit about how websites work under the hood but it is a very accessible tool for anyone with a story to tell.
In fact the community group went on to use the tool to create a virtual (and historic) pub crawl around Dawley. Which has proved very popular during lockdown.
Google Sheets mapping tool
We also set up an instance of a really useful tool which links Google Sheets to a web map (using leaflet). This allows the group to display all sorts of assets on a map without having to become experts in Geographical Information Systems. This is more technical to set up than the Storymap (it needs a Github account for instance) but once set up it’s really simple to manage… you just add things to a Google Sheet
And there is a really good step-by-step guide to the set-up.
1821-2021
Next year will be the 200 anniversary of Cinderloo. Thanks to a group of dedicated local people it will be an anniversary that will be marked by people across Telford.
It was great to be able to help out in a tiny way and to demonstrate how easy it is to get information onto web maps in a clear and engaging way.
The story of the uprising is told in a song by Staffordshire folk duo Chris Elliott and Caitlin Jones