 Helo, rhai, rhai, I'm Joe, I'm also like Carly from the Ibridge Institute at the University of Birmingham, and we're both working on a PhD project about the Ironbridge Gorge World Heritage Site. For this particular panel today, we thought we'd discuss a particular site within the World Heritage Site, the old O'Darby Furnace, which you can see here. Now, the old O'Darby Furnace's significance is that it's the place in the 18th century where Abraham Darby was the first person to oversee the smelting of iron with coke, which was a key part of kick-starting the Industrial Revolution and modern steel production, and it is one of the two monuments that was specifically identified in the Ironbridge World Heritage Nomination dossier. It's a key part of why the Ironbridge Gorge was inscribed. It's a key part of Ironbridge's selling point to the world. It describes itself as the birthplace of industry, and this is the source of that claim. In terms of its inscription, it's a key part of why the Ironbridge was inscribed under the category of an example of man's creative genius, and now it's part of the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust, and it's part of their museum of iron, but it's actually a physically separate structure. It's an industrial archaeological site rather than a museum. So there you can see it's now kind of in a nice little lush garden. But if you have a look, what you can really see here is at the top picture, it's not a very visually appealing site. If anyone's seen an old furnace from that kind of period, it's a square block of bricks. It is, as the title describes, it was described by someone who used to work at Ironbridge as a pile of wet bricks. So as an archaeological site, it's a multi-stage site. It's an industrial site, so it was a working site. It's been altered a lot before it became disused. And as such, it's quite a difficult site to interpret for a regular visitor. The solely textual interpretation, as you walk around the furnace, what you're reading is your reading texture panels that are explaining an industrial process because you have the added difficulty that it's actually the industrial process that's significant rather than the furnace itself. This struggles with the technical language, a high reading age on the textual panels. It also has the issue with a lot of industrial sites that it struggles to tell personal stories. Instead, it focuses on a broader, more technical process and its significance for the rest of the world. And it also has an issue with the fact that it's in this rather attractive, I quite like it, this pyramidal cover building, but it does give the impression when you're going inside that you're going round a church rather than what would have been a very hot, dirty, noisy industrial process. So that's a lot of negatives. Coral is going to take us through what's positive and opportunities for future interpretation. Yeah, I'm an optimist, so I thought I'd steal the positive sides. So one of the things, this session, we were looking at archaeology in World Heritage Sites, and we wanted to look at how archaeology is in many ways the problem for interpretation of the old furnace, but it's also very much a lot of its potential for a lot of its strengths as well. So a lot of the things that are difficult about it make it quite exciting potentially and still in the present as well. Some of these are hopes rather than the current situations. So the first thing is that it's slightly church-like inside. It's very, very quiet, very hushed. It has been described as sepolcral. That is not good. Slightly dead. And it is in a pyramid shape, so, you know, but, you know, mawsilium is a burial of archaeology. But actually, some of the people I've interviewed have been talking about how it's as a quiet space, it's quite contemplative, and that allows people to reflect, to be brought into a space where they expect to be awd by the things that they're seeing. So it's not an entirely negative. It sort of indicates that it is a special place. It's not busy, it's quiet, it's peaceful, and people can think, perhaps, in that space about the past. As such, it's actually a really wonderful space for storytelling. The people who get the most out of the site are people who go on guided tours, generally, and they seem to get here a lot more about what it was like and they can imagine a lot more about what it was like. So, as a stage, it's a place where visitors and guides can really interact in co-producing stories, and that's a really powerful way of engaging the public. As it's less iconic, there's another site in the World Heritage Site, which is the Iron Bridge. The Iron Bridge suffers a little from being too self-evident in many ways. People think it's a bridge. It's obviously important because it's a bridge. With the furnace, you have to ask questions. You have to go, why is this important? What is it? And that questioning thing, that's really positive for people engaging with it. And finally, yeah, it's a mystery, and people like the stories. People think of it as a puzzle, they go round and go, what is this? And that's exciting in its own way. So, the archaeology of the furnace causes some of its difficulties, but it's also some of its real potential for its future.