Making History was one of the most fun experiences I’ve had whilst studying History, and I’d love to share my group’s project with you. Our project was assessed through a presentation rather than a report, but I hope that my experiences can still give you a sense of just how creative you can be with this module.

My group’s project was on the Great Fire of London, and we got super creative with our final presentation. We decided that our target audience would be kids, and designed a mystery-solving, whodunnit-style presentation.

I played the detective investigating the cause of the fire. We also had Thomas Farryner, the baker on Pudding Lane, Robert Hubert, a madman who claimed to have started the fire, and even God! I took turns to interrogate each of the other characters and at the end of the presentation, we asked the audience to vote for who they thought started the fire.

We also made use of various props so as to include material culture in our presentation. These included a burnt pan, a brick with scorch marks, rosary beads, and pieces of burnt wood, all of which added to the humour of our presentation and helped our audience, the ‘children’ visualise what we were talking about.

To give you a sense of what went on in our presentation, here’s an extract of our script for the opening scene:

Freya (with Felix, Lian and Nell acting behind her): Hiya guys! Welcome to our historical investigation! We look at controversial moments in history and let you help us decide whooooo dun it! From Jack the Ripper to who stole the Crown Jewels. Today we are looking at the infamous fire of London and the history surrounding that. We are going to take you back to the seventeenth century, which is actually the 16 hundreds (don’t worry, we don’t know why it’s like that either) and examine the complex argument of what happened. Back then, there was major disagreements between the Catholic and Protestants, with the Catholics always being made out to be the bad guy. The English were fighting with the Dutch and poverty was at an all time high, with major overcrowding of houses in all areas. Right, are you ready??? Let’s go!

Urja: Hi guys. I’m detective Urja, here from the department of Crime and Robbery Investigation Services for Public Safety, CRISPS for short. As you know, it’s 1666, and a massive fire has just been put down. Now here are the facts. Let’s look at location first (points to the slide). It started in a bakery on Pudding Lane, near London Bridge, at about 0100 hours on 2nd September. The fire and spread far and wide, and it ended up destroying a third of London! 80,000 people are now homeless! Now, it’s my job to find out how it started. But I can’t do it all alone - I need your help in finding out who is responsible for this terrible tragedy. There are lots of rumours flying around, and I’m not quite sure what to believe. Some people are telling me it was a big plot by the Catholics… but other people say it was the baker! There’s also lots of different evidence lying around to help us. Even the simple things can tell us a HUGE amount about the fire. Take this brick for example… it has something called pitch all over it, which is really flammable and probably helped the fire to spread even further. There were loads of these in the cellar of a shop next to the bakery. So now we know that fire spread from here, the bakery, allll the way to these warehouses near the river, which had loads of flammable stuff in them like coal and oil! Anyway, on with the investigation. We need justice for the people of London! The criminal who started this must be found! So, what I’ll do now is show you all the suspects that I’ve found.  

In the background, we had a PowerPoint presentation running, with a couple of relevant pictures that added to our scenes and made the setting clearer. For example, when in the interrogation room, this slide was up:

We received some amazing peer and academic feedback for our presentation.

One of the comments were: ‘Your energy and creativity was utterly amazing! Your presentation was so targeted at your audience, with great explanations and putting a complex topic into terms that primary school children could understand and enjoy. Amazing use of props to engage children, especially loved the use of the brick, very comical. Very engaging and enjoyable.’

We genuinely loved putting it together, as it was an opportunity to have fun with History, something you rarely get to do when you’re cramming for GCSE/A-Level/university exams! I hope this has helped to inspire you to get really creative with your project, and most of all enjoy it!