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Success stories

No Bass Like Home, Brent (2020)

This heritage project put the spotlight on the reggae revolution that emerged from Brent in the 1960s and 1970s. It included recording 100 oral testimonies, the creation of a reggae history map highlighting key locations in Brent’s reggae history; and the No Bass Like Home Online Festival. The audio and video content, interviews and performances are now held by Brent Archives and Museum providing a significance resource for future work and creativity.

In Living Memory, Lewisham (2022)

Six community-led projects undertook primary research and gathered recollections to celebrate Lewisham’s diversity and heritage. The project, led by Goldsmiths (part of the University of London), empowered members of the community to tell their own stories, presenting them through traditional means as well as artistic and cultural activities and events. An online digital archive has been created and the intention is to deposit the material with the local authority archive service.

Stefan Skura, Knowsley (2022)

Some personal papers about Stefan Skura, a Polish national who migrated to England in 1947, were discovered 70 years later at a car-boot sale. For Knowsley Borough of Culture 2022 celebrations, the local authority archive service, which holds the collection, collaborated with Merseyside Polonia, a Polish not-for-profit organisation, on two exhibitions tracking the life of Skura and the composer and pianist, Frederic Chopin – placing their stories in the wider context of Polish history and migration.

The project provided an opportunity for the archives to make new connections and share the diversity of the collections. Polish volunteers visited the archive and worked together on translating the Skura collection. The collection has attracted new researchers to the archives and will be exhibited at the Smithy Heritage Centre in Eccleston in St Helen’s which is Liverpool City Region Borough of Culture in 2023.

Next steps

Whether the large cultural infrastructure project is being planned, is in progress or has already taken place, the critical next steps are the same:

  1. Speak to your archive service. What does it need? What, if any, digital preservation provision is already in place?
  2. Work with the archive service to use the Archive Service Resilience Indicator to benchmark the service. If the service is accredited, find out what its key areas of development are, as identified through the assessment process, and how the project can help further these. Use this information to help shape business/funding cases for the archive service so that it has the capacity and resources it needs.
  3. Continue to discuss the archive service’s needs as it works on archiving the large cultural infrastructure project. How can you continue to champion its work?

Further resources and advice

If you need further advice please contact asd@nationalarchives.gov.uk.