Museums and Heritage

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.

Eternal Telephone is an audio installation for The British Museum - an in-gallery experience around new display Four Lives, which looks at migration and identity in the ancient world. 

Eternal Telephone imagines a hotline to the past in which long-dead characters can call visitors’ smartphones and leave them a voicemail. These ten mini-monologues are accessed via a QR code in the gallery, augmenting the visitor experience by using theatrical techniques to bring the past to life.

Eternal Telephone is part of Reimagining the British Museum, a two year programme overhauling the visitor experience. 

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

A collaboration between Applied Stories, Worldmaking Beyond SOAS, Phakama and the GLA's Untold Stories fund, New Histories brings together theatre artists, academics and students, to design a workshop empowering local people to have their say about statues in their area. The results are used to inform short audio installations, professionally scripted, and performed by community casts.

For the 2022 pilot, we used the statue of William Gladstone outside Bow Church, E3 as our inspiration, with a live listening party at the foot of the statue.

Commission one of our Geocache audio trails for your outdoor space - gardens, grounds, woodlands or parks.

A geocache is an outdoor container whose coordinates have been uploaded and shared, usually using the Geocaching app. Placed in a series, a digital treasure hunt can be curated for any and all to take part. 

Unlike existing geocache trails, an Applied Stories geocache contains a QR code linking to a specially-created audio file designed to be listened to in that precise location.

An Applied Stories geocache trail suits any outdoor area with a story to tell, such as the gardens of country houses, powerfully enhancing the visitor experience.