In 2018, local poet Jean Aitkin led workshops using  a variety of collections at Shropshire Archive’s to provide inspiration for poems or short prose based on archive sources.

You can read the poems in the A3 Reivew (PDF).

Jean is running online courses at the moment and you can find out more about her work on her website www.jeanatkin.com

As part of our re-create, remember and re-imagine series, we suggested that you might like to choose a photograph for inspiration. One of my favourites, this evocative image of Rats Pit, is one that might lend itself to a story or poem. You can read more about the background to the photograph on a previous blog post.

Oddly enough it fits well with a poem that Jean sent to us – about the Cinderloo event of 1821. It was written as a collaborative project with Shropshire band Whalebone last year.  You can watch this on YouTube or download the poem Tom Palin and Cinderloo.

Why not search our photographs and images to see if you can find something to inspire you? Simply search our catalogue for a place or subject and then use the filters to show results with ‘images only’. We’d love to see what you create.