Stories in the Sky VR: Immersive storytelling, heritage-led stakeholder engagement, and community fatigue

Stories in the Sky VR was a prototype immersive storytelling experience focusing on Park Hill, Sheffield. The project explored the way that immersive technologies can be used as part of heritage-led community engagement, as a means to articulate intangible heritage. Park Hill represents one of the most divisive buildings in the country; it was regarded as a success in the 1960s, saw a period of dramatic decline in the 1980s and 1990s, and is currently being regenerated by Urban Splash, following the estate’s Grade II* listing in 1998. Through its redevelopment, Park Hill has not only seen an overhaul in its design, but also in the community that now calls the estate home, having transitioned from council estate to gentrified flats. Park Hill represented an ideal testing ground to investigate the potential of immersive technologies, with storytelling embedded in these “flats of the future” since their inception. While the listing details the estate’s value derives from its innovative design, Park Hill also has strong roots in the intangible, through its sense of enduring community, identities, and experiences. Stories in the Sky VR attempted to implement a “bottom-up” approach, giving the stakeholders more control over the narrative and nature of the immersive experience. Ultimately, this proved difficult to achieve, with the fatigue of interviews and tourism having soured large-scale interest in these types of projects. In place of new interviews, previously recorded oral testimonies were utilised to shape the focus of the immersive experience. The feedback for Stories in the Sky VR demonstrated that immersive experiences represent valuable tools to spark discussion on experience, and to successfully articulate intangible heritage, but for the case of Park Hill, it is concluded that the control of community-driven heritage might be better served developing from within.