Placed In A Fortress City:
Memory and Making of Belonging

Placed in a Fortress City: Memory and Making of Belonging explores how Portsmouth’s historic walls, forts and defensive landscapes continue to shape the way we experience, remember and belong to the city.

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Part of the Portsmouth 100 programme, the project brings together people of different generations and backgrounds to explore their own connections with these familiar, and sometimes overlooked, places. Through photography, mapping, storytelling, frottage, collage and cyanotypes, participants have been invited to look at the city through memories, stories and everyday encounters.

At the heart of the project is a simple question: how do places become part of who we are? Personal memories sit alongside inherited stories, local myths and official histories, revealing how our understanding of Portsmouth’s past is constantly changing.

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The resulting exhibition is a collaborative collection of these encounters. Rather than telling one story about Portsmouth’s heritage, it brings together many voices and ways of seeing. Participants become co-authors, using their own memories, experiences and imagination to explore what the city’s fortified landscape means to them today.

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The project is an invitation to look again at familiar places, and to consider how belonging is made through the stories we remember, the places we inhabit, and the histories we carry with us.

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Principal Investigator: Dr Tarek Teba

Co-Investigator: Nicola Crowson

Lead Artists: Evagelia Hagikalfa and Thaïs Verhasselt

Research Assistant: Dana Alsultan