Hidden Stories

This app has woven creative writing with smartphone technology to create a fascinating literary exploration of Leicester's Cultural Quarter; specially commissioned poetry, plays and narrative fiction explore urban locations and their history.

Follow trails around the area to find original content and uncover the Cultural Quarter's hidden stories. Each trail starts with a white marker on the map which signifies the first chapter of the story.

You can view the chapters of each story in any sequence. However, you might want to open them in the intended order so that you can see the narratives unfold. Simply follow the line on the map and open the next chapter when you have arrived at the location.

Hidden Stories has been commissioned as part of Affective Digital Histories: Recreating De-Industrialised Places, From the 1970s to the Present, a research project exploring the hidden and untold stories of people who lived and worked in former industrial buildings at two locations in the East Midlands: Leicester's Cultural Quarter and Glossop, a mill town in North Derbyshire. The project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and is based at the University of Leicester. Phoenix and app developer Cuttlefish are project partners. The app makes use of Cuttlefish's Empedia locative media platform.

Hidden Stories features creative writing by Divya Ghelani, David Devanny, Irfan Master, Carol Leeming and Kevan Manwaring. The illustrations and page layouts are by Mateus Domingos.