Firehouse VR, Foundational Immersive Heritage Project
Introduction
Firehouse was an interactive virtual reality heritage project created as my major work for a BA in Filmmaking. It explored the history, memory, and lived experience of London Road Fire Station, combining archival film, photography, and sound within an immersive environment.
This project laid the foundation for my career in immersive technology and directly shaped the research led, story first approach that now underpins AVimmerse’s immersive heritage work. It was not conceived as a technology demonstration, but as an attempt to translate place, memory, and social history into a form people could inhabit.
Original Poster for Gallery Presentation
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The site and its story
London Road Fire Station is more than a historic civic building. For decades it functioned as a place of work, a temporary home, and a social environment shaped by routines, risk, camaraderie, and public service.
Firehouse approached the building as a lived space rather than a static monument. The project brought together archival film, photographs, and recorded material to explore how institutional buildings carry personal histories, habits, and emotional weight long after their original function has ended.
Rather than reconstructing the building as a perfect digital replica, the experience focused on atmosphere, fragments, and memory. Users were invited to move through time as much as space.
Intertainment Magazine did a Feature and Interview about the Firehouse Project
Research and methods
The project was underpinned by detailed historical research into the fire station itself, alongside broader study into ideas of home, belonging, and social space drawn from social anthropology and sociology.
Practically, this involved learning and combining multiple methods, many of which would later define my professional practice.
These included archiving and digitising analogue photography and film, translating still and moving image into immersive environments, developing experimental editing techniques for early VR workflows, and learning the fundamentals of programming using off the shelf tools. This technical exploration later informed my decision to train as a Unity developer.
Firehouse was as much a research project as it was an artwork. It asked how digital tools might be used to hold fragile histories without flattening or sensationalising them.
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Left: Producing the context from history
Right: new consumer cameras allowed for precise placement
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Exhibition and recognition
Firehouse was first exhibited at the Holden Gallery, before being selected for wider public showcase at the Manchester Histories Festival and Manchester Science Festival.
The work attracted strong responses from both public audiences and professionals working in emerging media and research. At the time, the Director of BBC Research and Development described Firehouse as the best VR installation he had experienced, reinforcing the project’s impact beyond an academic setting.
The project was also selected for inclusion at Encounters Film Festival, although specific hardware requirements meant it was ultimately not shown.
Trailer and documentation
The original Firehouse VR trailer documents the experience and its exhibition context. It remains an important record of early immersive heritage practice and the methods explored during the project.
Legacy and continuation
Firehouse directly shaped the direction of my professional work, establishing immersive heritage as a long term practice rather than a one off experiment.
In 2023, the project was rebuilt and re presented as part of The Virtual Museum, connecting its original research and intent to contemporary immersive platforms.
Many of the methods developed during Firehouse now underpin AVimmerse’s work with archives, historic sites, cultural organisations, and communities, particularly where digital tools are used to reconnect people with overlooked or vulnerable histories.
The Virtual Museum Project 2023