THE Milford Street project is an innovative community drive to record first person histories of the city, using recordings of people’s memories to preserve them for the future.

It is also the project responsible for the decoration of the Milford Street bridge with colourful murals on either side of the road.

People living in the Milford Street Bridge area received compulsory purchase orders for their homes and businesses in the late 1960s to make way for the ring road.

The residents witnessed the demolition of their homes and businesses, where generations of their families had lived and worked.

Their little community was lost, but it wasn’t forgotten.

And the aim of The Milford Street Bridge Project was to engage people living around the area in discovering their community history before the relief road and the bridge were built.

Volunteers were trained to undertake oral history interviews with people whose lives had been affected by the building of the road.

Their individual histories contributed to the greater history of the area and were archived in the Wiltshire and Swindon Archives and at Salisbury Museum and a free CD was published with extracts from the recordings.

The project has now produced education packs as a free resource for primary schools based on the archive of material that has been gathered.

The packs consist of Powerpoint presentations with teachers’ notes and boxes of handling objects, focussing on the lives of ordinary people in Salisbury.

They have been written by a professional education specialist and are being trialled by pupils at St Mark’s Junior School, pictured above.

Once the youngsters and their teachers have given their feedback, the packs will go online over the summer where they can be downloaded by other schools.