Bringing Haig Pit's History to Life Through Immersive Heritage
Working with Levels Whitehaven to build digital skills, explore industrial heritage and develop a new virtual reality experience
Over the past few months, we’ve been working with Levels Whitehaven to explore how immersive technology can connect young people with the area’s industrial heritage while giving them practical experience of digital production.
What began as an invitation to deliver on Levels’ summer school programme developed into a wider collaboration centred on Haig Pit, the former coal mine whose history remains part of many local families’ lives.
The work now combines 360-degree filmmaking, 3D modelling, local research and the development of a virtual reality experience. Our involvement has ranged from co-designing the brief and delivering practical workshops to training staff, working with heritage contributors and developing the immersive experience itself.
A Place with Stories to Tell
Haig Pit was once an important source of employment in the area. Although the colliery closed decades ago, its story continues through the people who worked there and the children and grandchildren who grew up hearing about life at the mine.
Together with Levels, we helped shape a project brief that would give young people an active role in interpreting this history, rather than simply using the site as a backdrop for a technical exercise. We wanted the learning to be practical, creative and grounded in a real place.
Designing an Immersive Learning Programme
The first stage focused on giving participants a foundation in 360-degree filmmaking. We designed and delivered workshops covering how to capture 360 video, edit the footage and experience the results through virtual reality headsets.
Alongside working with the young people, we trained Levels staff in the filmmaking process and developed a repeatable workshop format. This was an important part of the brief: the aim was not only to deliver a successful summer programme, but to leave the team with a practical approach they could use and adapt for future groups.
Capturing Haig Pit in 360 Degrees
The young people then had the opportunity to apply those skills at and around Haig Pit. Filming in 360 degrees requires a different way of thinking from conventional video: the viewer can look in every direction, so camera placement, activity and the surrounding environment all become part of the storytelling.
Recording the site also gave the participants a direct connection to the heritage they were exploring. Their footage was not simply a workshop exercise; it became source material for the immersive experience being developed around the history of the colliery.
From First-Time Modellers to 3D Content Creators
For the next phase, we designed and delivered an intensive five-day 3D modelling programme with college students from a local UTC. Most began with no previous experience of 3D modelling, so the challenge was to introduce the foundations of Blender while giving the group enough confidence to create their own work. There were approximately 12 students attending each day.
Over the week, the students developed models connected to the mining environment and the wider heritage brief. The quality of their progress was particularly rewarding: in just five days, they moved from unfamiliarity with the software to producing detailed digital assets, with selected models making their way into the developing VR experience.
That connection between learning and production matters. The students were not merely completing training exercises; they could see how their work could contribute to a real heritage project.
Learning from the People Connected to the Pit
The technical work has been only one part of the process. We also spent time learning about Haig Pit and its local history, meeting former miners and working with the people connected to the site, including its current owner Mike Johnson.
Those conversations have helped inform the direction of the project and the stories we want to tell. Accounts of working life at the colliery offer a human perspective that a digital reconstruction alone could never provide. Bringing that lived experience into the work is essential if the finished piece is to feel rooted in Whitehaven rather than simply demonstrate immersive technology.
Building an Immersive Heritage Experience in Virtual Reality
The next challenge has been bringing the different elements together. Using Unity3D, we have been developing the immersive environment and working on how the 3D content, location-based 360 footage, narration involving young people, and accounts from former miners, can form a coherent experience.
The intention is to blend reconstructed spaces with recordings from the real site, allowing visitors to encounter Haig Pit through more than one form of storytelling. It involves decisions about the sequence of scenes, the transitions between different media and how sound and visual detail can support the historical narrative.
At the time of writing, the experience is still being assembled. This is an ongoing production, and we look forward to sharing more of the finished work as the final elements come together.
Developing Skills and Creating a Lasting Heritage Resource
For us, one of the strongest aspects of the collaboration has been its combination of digital skills development and community heritage. Young people have learned new production techniques while contributing to a project informed by the memories and experiences of an earlier generation. And more importantly, it is their own heritage that is being explored and created by local people.
The longer-term ambition is for the completed VR experience to become part of a permanent local museum display. That outcome is still being developed, but it provides an important goal: to create something that can continue engaging audiences beyond the workshops themselves.
Working with Levels has shown how education, creative technology and local knowledge can be brought together to develop new forms of heritage interpretation. As the project moves towards completion, we’ll share further updates on the immersive experience and the work created by the participants.
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