Be inspired
Start with somewhere you know.
Fenland is full of beginnings: a street that changed, a voice you still hear, a shop that disappeared, a journey repeated for years, a photograph in a drawer, a field, a factory, a kitchen, a river, a railway platform, a family phrase. Common Ground helps you notice what might already be a story.
Start with a place
You do not need to know the history first. Begin with what you remember, what you notice now, or what you want to ask somebody else.
Look slowly · ask specifically · keep the detail
A port town shaped by water, trade, arrival, architecture and generations of everyday life.
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A railway town, market town and meeting place where repeated journeys leave traces.
Tradition, archaeology, fen landscape and local rituals sit close together here.
Workplaces, routes, streets and disappeared infrastructure can unlock stories that maps alone cannot hold.
Manea, Doddington, Wimblington, Elm, Leverington, Friday Bridge, Parson Drove, Coates, Eastrea, Turves, Pondersbridge, Benwick and many more are part of the living map.
Ely, Peterborough, King’s Lynn, Ramsey, Downham Market and other surrounding places may form part of a Fenland resident’s real story. Programme eligibility remains based on living in Fenland.
Do you remember this?
A photograph records what the camera could see. Memory can restore the temperature, noise, waiting, work, excitement and people outside the frame.
Then / now
These views are from different positions, so we do not pretend they are a perfect overlay. Put them beside one another and notice what persists.
Four archive windows
Every pairing below is source-linked. Where two images are not the same viewpoint, we say so. Use them to notice change, then take the unanswered part to somebody who remembers.
Wisbech · March · Whittlesey · Chatteris
Wisbech
The point is not to force a perfect before-and-after. Compare the river edge, building line, movement and atmosphere, then ask what a painting or photograph cannot tell you about living there.
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March
These two photographs are close enough in subject to notice change, but still taken from different positions. Treat them as evidence to question rather than a visual trick pretending nothing moved.
Whittlesey
This is deliberately not an exact then-and-now view: one image is a seventeenth-century map and the other a modern Market Place photograph. The gap between them is the invitation — water, routes, names, settlement and local memory.
Chatteris
The station and High Street are not the same viewpoint. Pairing them is about movement through the town: how people travelled, where they met, what became harder, and which routines survived after the line closed.
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Story sparks
Choose the image or question that catches you. You are not choosing your final story — only a doorway into one.
Which job, factory, farm, workshop or shift pattern shaped a family?
Follow this question →
Which room, object or repeated phrase immediately takes you home?
Follow this question →Which journey became so ordinary that you stopped noticing it?
Follow this question →
Which smell, recipe or weekly ritual belongs to your version of Fenland?
Follow this question →What do local people understand about this tradition that outsiders might miss?
Follow this question →What can you still describe clearly even though it is gone?
Follow this question →
Which sound tells you where you are before you open your eyes?
Follow this question →
What did somebody bring with them when they made a life here?
Follow this question →Small places, big stories
Manea, Doddington, Wimblington, Elm, Leverington, Friday Bridge, Parson Drove, Coates, Eastrea, Turves, Pondersbridge and Benwick belong in the visual record too. These photographs are starting points, not claims that one landmark represents a whole village.
Choose a place · notice one detail · ask one person
Which journey from Manea has become so ordinary that you have stopped noticing what it means?
Take Manea into Story Lab →
Where do people in Doddington gather, and which voices or rituals make that place feel local?
Take Doddington into Story Lab →
Which corner of Wimblington would you choose to explain the village to somebody who had never lived there?
Take Wimblington into Story Lab →
What landmark, road or building tells you that you are back in Elm before anyone says the name?
Take Elm into Story Lab →.jpg)
Which part of Leverington looks unchanged but carries a completely different life now?
Take Leverington into Story Lab →
What happens in Friday Bridge that would look unimportant to a visitor but matters to people who live there?
Take Friday Bridge into Story Lab →
Who has used the same green, road or meeting point in Parson Drove in a completely different way from you?
Take Parson Drove into Story Lab →
Which hall, club, pub, team or repeated event has brought different generations of Coates together?
Take Coates into Story Lab →
Which small detail in Eastrea would disappear from the record if nobody stopped to photograph or describe it?
Take Eastrea into Story Lab →
What does the road through Turves connect in your life: work, school, family, friendship, leaving or coming home?
Take Turves into Story Lab →
What does the water around Benwick change about how the village looks, moves or feels across the year?
Take Benwick into Story Lab →Images are credited to their photographers and linked back to the source record. The story belongs to the person who knows the place.
From the outreach
Common Ground asked people who make, notice and tell stories around the Fens to offer one useful creative spark. Artist and sound-maker Nick Tearle responded with a reflection on the scale of the landscape, then shared Waterland as a listening prompt.
For me the openness and scale of the fenland landscape has a humbling and healing effect on my sense of wellbeing. As clouds drift past overhead and you gaze into the endless unobstructed horizon, you simply can’t help but feel like a small part of nature buffeted and blown around by the cross winds just like the crops in the fields and the birds in the sky.
Shared by Nick Tearle, Fenland artist, alongside his painting Rays of Hope, 2024. Used with Nick's permission.
Take Nick's prompt into Story Lab →Nick also supplied Common Ground with a private preview from his forthcoming Waterland album. The piece combines ambient synth and distant storm recordings with an interview and poem by Fenland farmer, author and poet Rex Sly.
The recording itself is not republished here while the album remains unreleased. This page links to Nick's public Waterland project instead.
Fenland now
Nightlife, cars, food, football, fashion, work, dating, gaming and local in-jokes are part of the record too. The everyday present becomes somebody's archive surprisingly quickly.
Soul, reggae, pub bands, choirs, playlists, first gigs and the songs that soundtrack a town.
What song, venue or night out instantly places you in Fenland? →First cars, bike meets, modified motors, long drives, garage culture and the freedom of getting out of town.
What vehicle, journey or meeting place became part of your identity? →Takeaways, market food, family recipes, farm produce, new arrivals and the dish everybody argues about.
Which Fenland food story would you make somebody taste before you explained it? →Barbers, salons, nails, trainers, workwear, wedding outfits and the looks that mark a time in your life.
What did getting ready say about who you wanted to be? →Sunday teams, youth football, away days, touchline characters, changing rooms and the match nobody forgot.
Which game or football person deserves to become a local story? →First dates, friendships, break-ups, bus-stop conversations, group chats and the places everybody knew.
Which ordinary meeting place carries an unexpectedly big memory? →Market stalls, reselling, delivery rounds, small businesses, night shifts, farm work and making something from little.
What is the smartest or strangest way you have seen somebody make a living here? →Gaming friends, TikTok, Facebook groups, local memes, WhatsApp communities and lives lived partly on-screen.
What does the internet understand about Fenland that outsiders do not? →Arriving, leaving, translating, sending money home, mixed households, accents, faith, food and belonging to more than one place.
When did Fenland begin to feel like home — or not quite home? →The corner shop, shortcut, estate, park, skate spot, bench or road name that means more locally than it does on a map.
Which tiny patch of your town could you describe better than anyone else? →Rumours, characters, ghost stories, strange encounters, pub tales and stories that get better every time they are retold.
What local story sounds made up but everybody seems to know? →In-jokes, pronunciation, shortcuts, weather, drains, geese, traffic, market days and the details visitors never notice.
What would you put in a secret guide to understanding Fenland? →Story signals happening around us
These are dated or current external local sources, not Common Ground events. They are useful because a search for what is happening now can become a doorway into a personal story.
March Town Council's 2026 calendar shows how many different versions of local culture can sit in one town: music, motor culture, social nights and community events.
Fenland Food Festival brings growers, makers, food businesses and live music together in Wisbech. Food can open stories about work, migration, family, taste and local pride.
Local cultural programmes are not only heritage. Contemporary performance and participatory events create fresh memories, communities and stories right now.
Chatteris Music Society's programme is a reminder that ambitious live music belongs in Fenland too — and every audience has its own memories.
Discover Fenland stories
These are useful, locally researched story pages rather than keyword filler. Choose a town or theme to find source material, prompts and a direct route into Story Lab.
Fenland story questions
Anything rooted in lived experience can be a starting point: family, streets, work, nightlife, food, football, migration, local legends, childhood, music, waterways, changing shops, journeys or an ordinary object with a memory attached.
No. Common Ground is interested in the present as well as the past. A night out, car meet, football match, takeaway, group chat, side hustle, first job or friendship can matter just as much as an archive photograph.
The Be Inspired page links to independent resources including Historic England, the Fenland Collection and Whittlesey Museum, alongside credited Creative Commons photographs used as story prompts.
Yes. The Common Ground Story Lab can help you begin with a place, object, sound or question and develop it toward writing, audio, photography, film or mixed-media storytelling.
Do you remember this?
Chatteris railway station closed in 1967. A closure can be an infrastructure story, but it can also be a story about a commute, a goodbye, a first trip, a job, or how the town felt before and after.
Start with an object
These are prompts, not participant artefacts. The right object can carry work, migration, family, faith, school, friendship or a daily ritual without trying to tell everything at once.
Listen to the place
Stand or sit somewhere safe. Notice the closest sound, the furthest sound, what repeats, what interrupts, and what disappears when you start listening for it.
Before the drains, roads and maps you know
Old maps can make the familiar landscape strange again. You do not need to become a historian. Ask what the map makes you curious about: water, names, routes, work, land, boundaries and stories passed down.
Start from the mapOpen the archives
These collections are independent resources. Common Ground links to them for discovery and does not claim ownership of their archive material.
A local heritage hub with aerial and historic material that can help you notice what changed in March, Wisbech, Whittlesey and Chatteris.
Explore the collection ↗Cambridgeshire’s local-studies collection includes photographs, newspapers and the Lilian Ream archive of Wisbech life. Use it to research a place, person, street or memory.
Explore the collection ↗Thousands of objects, photographs and documents connect Whittlesey and surrounding villages to work, home, landscape and local tradition.
Explore the collection ↗Find the story already there
Take one place, detail, object, sound or question into the Story Lab. If Common Ground feels like the right place to develop it, you can then explore taking part.
Current funded programme
The current 16-person Digital Storytelling Lab is supported through Arts Council England National Lottery Project Grants. Common Ground is the wider place-based storytelling platform around that funded spine.
