About the PRTV Project
The Peterlee Relational Test Vehicle (PRTV) is an ongoing archival and speculative framework concerned with Peterlee and its surrounding districts.
The project operates through a combination of documented history, infrastructural research, civic observation, speculative reconstruction and public contribution. It treats Peterlee not as a fixed historical object, but as a relational environment shaped by interacting systems, conditions, memories and projected futures.
PRTV assumes that no single account of the town is complete.
Material within the archive may include:
- administrative records
- oral testimony
- planning documentation
- photographic surveys
- speculative reconstructions
- systems diagrams
- unresolved reports
- fictional or semi-fictional artefacts
- contradictory or disputed material
These forms are treated not as separate categories of truth and fiction, but as interconnected records within a wider civic and cultural landscape.
The project accommodates multiple, overlapping and occasionally incompatible versions of Peterlee. No single configuration is treated as definitive, canonical or idealised.
Rather than constructing a singular fictional narrative, PRTV functions as an evolving civic archive through which different versions of the town can be documented, compared, tested and reinterpreted.
Relational Structure
The project draws from:
- local history
- municipal planning
- industrial systems
- technological research
- speculative infrastructure
- community memory
- regional folklore
- public space
- institutional behaviour
Meaning within the archive is structured relationally.
Places, events, systems and people are understood through their interdependencies rather than as isolated facts. Outcomes emerge through overlap, association, contradiction and constraint.
This relational approach is central to the project’s structure.
Institutional Tone and Archive Behaviour
The public-facing PRTV archive generally presents itself as a functioning civic and archival body continuing from the late twentieth century into the present day.
Contributors are encouraged to work within or adjacent to this framework where appropriate.
The archive may therefore contain:
- incomplete or degraded records
- procedural language
- institutional inconsistencies
- disputed interpretations
- partially classified material
- recovered or reconstructed documents
- conflicting testimony
- unresolved observations
The project benefits from ambiguity, restraint and procedural seriousness.
Material does not need to align to a single aesthetic or narrative direction in order to remain compatible with the archive.
The primary consideration is whether a submission plausibly contributes to the wider relational landscape of Peterlee as indexed by the PRTV.
Historical Reference: The Original PRTV
The project takes its name from PRTV, the relational database system developed at IBM’s Peterlee facility during the 1970s.
This historical system acts both as a factual anchor and as a structural metaphor for the archive itself:
a network of relationships through which meaning emerges from connection rather than isolation.
The historical existence of IBM in Peterlee, together with the town’s wider modernist and industrial context, provides much of the project’s grounding framework.
Why Peterlee?
Peterlee presents an unusually generative environment for relational speculation due to its overlapping histories of:
- New Town planning
- mining and industrial labour
- unrealised civic ambition
- technological experimentation
- municipal modernism
- community persistence
- infrastructural change
The project is not concerned with presenting idealised futures or simplified decline narratives.
Instead, it examines how planning, belief, systems, labour and memory continue to shape the town across both documented and speculative conditions.
Current Form
PRTV currently exists as:
- an online archive
- a research platform
- a publishing framework
- a participatory civic mythology
- a developing physical installation and exhibition system
The archive is intended to continue expanding through contributions, reinterpretations, recovered material and associated investigations.
Future Development: PRTV Visitors Centre
The long-term ambition of the project is the creation of a public-facing PRTV Visitors Centre.
Conceived as a hybrid civic interface, archive and interpretive environment, the Visitors Centre would combine:
- diagrams and operational displays
- reconstructed devices and models
- audiovisual installations
- public submissions
- infrastructural mapping
- archival material
- speculative spatial representations
The Visitors Centre is not intended as a museum of a single future or narrative.
It functions instead as a navigational space through which visitors encounter multiple relational versions of Peterlee simultaneously.
Participation
Partnership enquiries, collaborative submissions, research contributions and associated material are welcomed.