Photo: East London Textile Arts at Little Ilford Church. Credit: K. J. Martin for Newham Heritage Month
The project has reached another milestone by securing a further £756,616 in funding – a grant of £551,743 from The National Lottery Heritage Fund and £204,870 of Public Sector Decarbonisation Funding.
SCCI have pledged £6k funding and £10K worth of staff, support and equipment costs to realise these ambitious plans, including the use of our Memory Bike and Workshop, a collecting and digitisation project within the UCL Urban Room at UCL East.
The Memory Workshop supports the digital documentation and archiving of oral histories and everyday soundscapes. The Memory Bike is an extension of this workshop, a bicycle-mounted recording and listening station designed to support co-produced work and capture local voices in East London.
SCCI researchers will use these facilities to co-produce community sessions, from story collection to playing defunct media, with the aim of showcasing and celebrating the existing wealth of community-produced resources in the area and developing these further.
Anna Maguire, public historian and co-lead of the SCCI Public History MA, said:
“Newham Heritage Centre is an exciting project that Public History and the Memory Workshop are delighted to support in recognition of our aligned goals. We look forward to developing shared digital resources and support for the rich history and heritage of the Borough.”
Haidy Geismar, Director of SCCI adds:
“The Memory Workshop and Bike enables us to take the equipment and expertise at UCL beyond our new campus and make it available to our partners around the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. We are excited to support local community initiatives and voices in this bold new venture, and to future collaborations with the people of Newham.”
UCL Special Collections will be delivering public consultation through The New Curators Project, training and supporting a new volunteer cohort, and helping to devise work placements.
UCL Special Collections have been collaborating with the London Borough of Newham since 2017 through exhibition development, Newham Heritage Month activity, and The New Curators Project, a flagship community initiative for young East Londoners looking to work in the cultural heritage sector. They will continue to act as a critical friend as Newham expand their team and services.
Vicky Price, Head of Outreach at UCL Special Collections, said:
“UCL Special Collections’ relationship with Newham has long been vital to our community programming, but this thrilling development is a real opportunity for us to assist Newham in areas that we have expertise, to learn from our partner and to be a part of a hugely valuable community resource.”
The project will also include activities and partnerships with V&A East, Newham Music, IROKO, Royal Docks and East London Foundation Trust.
The National Lottery Heritage development grant funding will kick-start the next phase of the project which will include working with residents and community groups to curate the centre’s programme, as well as finally beginning the process of protecting, cataloguing and relocating the borough’s archive collection.
These will be stored in a state-of-the-art, purpose-built archive and showcased, along with the borough’s museum collections, in the transformed old library building. The latest milestone forms part of Newham Council’s commitment to delivering on their Building Newham’s Creative Future cultural strategy.