Museum of Stories: Bury Park

Museum of Stories: Bury Park is a new app containing twelve mini audio dramas, each lasting 5-10 minutes and inspired by real people’s experiences of the area. They were created in partnership with Bury Park communities past and present, who also perform the plays. Each story is pinned to the location in Bury Park, Luton where it actually happened. The stories range from the 19th century founder of Bury Park, one Charles Mees, right up to the contemporary story of a young optician who only recently came to Bury Park from Pakistan for her own safety. Almost every decade of the 20th century is represented, with memories of the queues outside the Empire Cinema in the 1930s, a World War Two story, a story about the thriving Jewish community in the 1950s, another remembering the National Front marches and local resistance movements of the 1980s, and yet more about the snooker clubs and halal chicken joints of the 1990s. There’s even a real-life ghost story! Come and discover this historically diverse district of Luton through its stories. The full walk lasts around 90 minutes and involves walking 1km on flat urban roads. Museum of Stories is an Applied Stories production funded by Arts Council England, supported by Revolution Arts and Luton Borough Council’s Heritage department. The app is GPS enabled. This is used to show you relevant content based on your location. Please note that you do not have to be in Luton in order to access any of the content in the app. The app also uses Location Services and Bluetooth Low Energy to determine your location when the app is running in the background. It will trigger notifications when you are close to a location of interest. We have used GPS and Bluetooth Low Energy in a power-efficient way: such as only performing Bluetooth Low Energy scans when you are close to a location that uses Bluetooth Beacons. However, as with all apps that use location, please note that continued use of GPS running in the background can dramatically decrease battery life.