How does it feel when you’ve found your ideal? Ever so goosey, goosey, GooseyGoo! Honk! Honk!
It is important to be enthusiastic about something and here at GooseyGoo, we love industrial heritage! But it doesn’t stop there, we love all information that contributes to our British industrial culture. After all, it helped to shape our identity and should be preserved for the generations to follow.
“We applaud those who preserve and maintain these wonderful slices of life and would like to be part of the celebration.”
The GooseyGoo website is an online collaborative industrial heritage mapping project for everybody to add their knowledge to. We can discover and plot our local relics that may otherwise sit unloved and unappreciated, or worse still – be lost from our landscape without our knowledge! Obviously all the well-recognised sites, such as Brunel’s SS Great Britain, or Telford’s massive aqueduct and Darby’s Iron Bridge, they are great, but they are safe. We need to plot and record the small stuff, the decaying stuff, the hidden stuff, the stuff that’ll never be protected by the financial safety-net created by a well-attended visitor attraction!
By plotting the industrial activities of the past we may create more importance for their preservation and inspire the younger generation to see the value in British Industrial Heritage and the importance of the culture that it inspires.
“GooseyGoo has one main aim – to investigate and share industrial relics in the UK of all sizes and apparent importance in the hope that people will enjoy them, care for them, restore and preserve them.”
If everybody photographs the relics of our industrial past year after year, we will be able to plot their condition and as they change we will have a visual record of how they were and what restoration is required! Forever the optimist, I feel that every relic has an argument for restoration, but without evidence of rapid or recent deterioration, authorities may not see the ergency to protect them, only seeing them as a dangerous remnant or in the way of new development! So generating visual records and to raise awareness and appreciation of our relics is hugely important for future campaigns.
So, what can you do on GooseyGoo? You can….
- Browse industrial heritage sites by region, subject or even facilities, eg limekilns in the South West, light houses across the UK or mining sites with a café!
- Add the industrial sites that you know about to the GooseyGoo map, contribute to an existing site or become an ‘at your leisure’ moderator!
- Find out what campaigns, to save and preserve industrial heritage, are ongoing in the UK.
- Plan your trips – find out where to stay and how to get there!
- You can rate your experiences and read what other people say.
- You can favourite your preferred sites and personalise GooseyGoo.
- You can plot your campaign on the map so that people can find and support you!
- You can advertise your heritage café, museum or business, such as steam train rides or restoration services!
- And you can share it all to Facebook and Twitter etc.
- Read interesting articles by guest writers about their industry-related interests and first-hand experiences.
- Understand how the successful preservation of industrial relics was achieved, with detailed accounts in the Success Stories.
- And we want to support all your well-meaning endeavours in the realm of British industrial heritage so that you can enjoy it!
It all started when… we realised we were going to be early by several hours to collect a second-hand car from Manchester. We were bored of being in the car, but relieved to be away from our computers and just wanted to see something juicy, something industrial, something old, oh and grab a great coffee at the same time….. we love industrial heritage and restorations from a bygone era…we get very enthused about some old masonry or rusty relic and I have spent countless hours writing about the hustle and bustle ‘up North’. And finally, here we were….amongst it all, but blinded by the motorway with only an occasional brown sign to reel us in. Obviously I set about ‘Googling it’, confident that I would find that elusive canal-side café with ample parking so that we could grab a slice of homemade carrot cake and a cheeky latté and sit in the sun overlooking an aqueduct with the ducks, but no! It wasn’t to be. Only “Please follow the brown signs to the city centre for a full day-out for all the family – discounts online!” No thanks – I want to see the real stuff, the raw stuff, the stuff in-situ – the stuff for free! Thankfully, this frustration led to a cure and the formation of the industrial explorer map dropped-anchor in my mind.
Map App. Industrial Explorer App. Roaming App for Industrial Buffs. Relics Galore. Rusty Relics. Industrial Discoverer. Heritage Hunter. Heritage Hound…Argh!…they all said it, but nothing quite sparked that glint of glee within me. Then, over a perfectly poured half (of Tribute), I recalled my dad calling me GooseyGoo. Boom!
Digging into any available funds we started crystallising a sprawling manuscript of technical specifications into a logo and a website…..
Hopefully in the future when I find myself away for the weekend or even planning a weekend break, I can ‘GooseyGoo it’ instead of ‘Googling it’ and I will see what water wheels, windmills or inclined planes are lurking behind the hedges! Honks away!
If, like us, you love British Industrial Heritage, then we hope you’ll love GooseyGoo!
