East, South East and South West

Aviva Archives

Image credit: Aviva Group Archive

Aviva Group Archive launched a digitisation, auto-transcription and mapping project of over 130,000 policy records from between 1697 and 1865, insuring the properties of a range of people, from royalty and politicans to cheesemongers and bakers. The project is helping to share this rich social and family history resource with a wider audience, using technology to unlock handwritten historical documents.

South West Heritage Trust (Devon Archives and Local Studies)

A screenshot of a website showing different historical figures

Image credit: South West Heritage Trust

The archive engagement team at South West Heritage Trust worked with external stakeholders to create a website and mobile app called the Torbay Discovery Trail. The trail enables students to uncover more about notable figures like Agatha Christie and Sue Barker using the archive’s collections. The Trail received the Alan Ball Award for Outstanding Local History E-Publication 2021.

Gloucestershire Archives/Gloucestershire County Council

Two people smiling and pointing at a blue plaque on a wall

Image credit: Gloucestershire Archives

Gloucestershire Archives created an exhibition about the Kindertransport, the programme that rescued children from Nazi-controlled territories before the Second World War. The exhibition led to American descendants of rescued children contacting the archive and a blue plaque was commissioned. They also created a video on the importance of archives and ran a series of inclusive community events.

John Lewis Partnership

Three woman looking at a display of photographs

Image credit: John Lewis Partnership Archive Collection

The John Lewis Partnership archive researched and created eight profiles of women who had contributed to the health, welfare and business success of the organisation. These profiles were added to John Lewis’ gender network Google community of over 1700 people. The project raised the profile of the archive and brought the archive closer to the wider team.

Oxford Brookes University Special Collections and Archive

A black and white photo of Blues musicians playing in the street

Image credit: Oxford Brookes University Special Collections and Archive

Oxford Brookes University Special Collections and Archive recently made the Paul Oliver Archive of African American Music accessible to the public. The project created over 1,800 catalogue records and digitised 270 hours of audio reels. The project team developed exhibitions and a webinar series that attracted speakers and audiences from the international Blues community.

Surrey History Centre

A group of people at prayer in a cemetery

Image credit: Tom Sebastiano (Nasserpuria Memon prayers at Brookwood Cemetery)

Surrey Heritage has been a partner in a two-year National Lottery Heritage Fund project, led by Woking Asian Business Forum (WABF), which has explored and documented minority burial grounds in Brookwood Cemetery (which has the highest concentration of minority burial grounds in the UK). The project archive includes community oral histories, a documentary film, a booklet and a photographic survey, much of which is now accessible on the Exploring Surrey’s Past website.

PK Porthcurno

A world map showing telegraph cable routes in 1894

Image credit: PK Porthcurno, PHO/182

PK Porthcurno is a museum exploring global communications. Their recent project ‘PK150 Connected Collections‘ partnered citizen curators from Exeter University with international students at locations associated with telegraphic communications, including India, New Zealand, and Zimbabwe. PK150 enabled remote access to the PK archive and was part of a wider project to create a searchable online database of their entire collection.