Councils and Communities

Museum of Stories is a geolocative audio walk of a high street, featuring stories told by real residents pinned to the locations where they happened. Each 5-minute minidrama is designed to be listened to in situ, at locations up and down Dunstable Road, with the street itself as the gallery.

The new free app is now live in app stores.

The project started with a phone line, which anyone can call and leave any story about Bury Park, in any language. A selection were then paired with a professional writer to help develop a script.

Museum of Stories tests out the idea of publicly sourcing stories and memories of a specific area, as a pool of material for a new place-based audio gallery

The format is replicable for any commercial street with good footfall, and can actively encourage visitors to otherwise overlooked areas, while reaching out to the communities there.

New Histories is a participatory community project inspired by historical statues from Britain’s past.

It starts with a two-hour workshop nearby, unpacking the truth of the man on the plinth, before inviting participants to make their own creative responses. 

The results inform a new 5-minute audio installation, professionally scripted and performed by community casts. These short, creative responses from local voices are designed to be listened to in situ, as audio art works, at the foot of the statue itself.

Our 2022 pilot took its inspiration from the statue of William Gladstone outside Bow Church E3. You can read more and listen to the results here. 

The workshop and process we have designed is replicable, and can be commissioned for any town or city with an appropriate statue and willing community groups, including schools.

Forbidden Sirens is a new digital format for a post-Covid era: an outdoor, audio ghost walk of a city centre, in which the hauntings are drawn from the cultural traditions of the diverse diaspora populations inhabiting that city. 

The walk is made up of six tales of 5 minutes each, with music from local musicians covering the walks between each stop (c.60 mins audience experience in total). 

Each tale will be developed with a community group into whose cultural tradition the story falls. Stories will be linked to six specific locations within the city centre, each a local business such as a restaurant or shop owned by community members affected by the haunting. At the end of each story there will be an opportunity to stop and spend something at the business, such as buying some food, or a memento, before moving on. All six locations will be a short walk from one another, and can be experienced in any order.

This format is currently in development, and Applied Stories is looking for town and borough councils to develop a working prototype.

Taxi Tales is a community format in which local minicab drivers are paired with a writer, to create a bespoke monologue for them to perform to customers in their cars. 

Originally piloted as a live theatre community project in Stock-on-Tees in 2015, a version of Taxi Tales was adapted for BBC 2 and broadcast in 2018. 

The format can work as live performance in cars, pre-recorded speeches, or a celebratory scratch night of minicab drivers performing at their local venue.