Our shopping habits have changed dramatically in the last decade and many iconic Edinburgh shops have disappeared from our retail landscape; from street corner grocers to department store window dressers to St Cuthbert’s Co-operative milk roundsmen.
‘Away for the Messages’ was a reminiscence project themed around the retail and shopping heritage of Edinburgh and its environs. Using our extensive picture archive hosted on Edinburgh Collected we created an exhibition in our dedicated display space at Ocean Terminal shopping centre which explored the range and extent of Edinburgh’s former retail history. With this display as our window into the city’s retail heritage, we aimed to grow our archival collection through donated images and to capture lived experience through oral history recordings for our ‘Away for the Messages’ podcast series.
This project has been generously supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, Scotland, made possible by players of the National Lottery.