Outside the Box

This week we are joined in conversation by David Luck, Archivist for the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust.  Alongside his many other hats, David looks after the historic records held at Bethlem Museum of the Mind, including those from the Bethlem Royal Hospital, the Maudsley Hospital, and Warlingham Park Hospital. Bethlem Museum of the Mind records the lives and experience and celebr...

This week we are joined by Hannah Mackay from the Perth and Kinross Archive. Hannah works with their sound collection, which since the 1970s has been collecting the voices of regional residents relating to all aspects of the history of Perth & Kinross. In this episode about oral history, Hannah shares with us her work on the sound collection, some early oral history techniques and technologies, qu...

This week we hear from four brilliant guests to learn more about the Scottish Political Archives (SPA) housed at the University of Stirling.  Joining us are Rosie Al-Mulla, Archivist at the University of Stirling, Grant Thoms, Lecturer and Editor of the Scots Independent Newspaper, Bria Bednarick, volunteer on the Scots Independent Archive project, and Francis Bell, a student at the University of...

This week we are joined by Beck Price, the archivist for the Voices Through Time: The Story of Care programme at Coram.  Voices Through Time: The Story of Care  is an ambitious project to digitise the earliest part of Coram's historic archive, going all the way back to 1739 when it was established as the Foundling Hospital, the country's first home for children whose mothers could not take care of...

This week we are having a different conversation. Kirsty Brooks is an artist who works with glass to create site-specific artworks that respond to the history or functioning of its surroundings. The begining of her creative design process more or less always starts by rummaging in an archive. Join us as Kristy shares her processes, her favourite pieces found and conversations had, as well as her o...

This week we are joined by Sarah Cobham, CEO of Dream Time Creative, a place-based creative organisation set up with the aim to help other women feel empowered, enabled and emboldened in their creative and cultural voices. Dream Time Creative won the 2023 Community Archive and Heritage Award with their project 'Forgotten Women of Wakefield' which aimed to redressed the imbalance in blue plaques in...

This week we are joined by Principal Archivist at the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre, Ally McConnel, to talk about their work bringing gardening and archives together, as well as the wondrous, tiny tangible moments that can be found within archives and how they can be heart and soul of a community in the most unassuming ways. Learn more about Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre here: https:...

This week we are joined by Olivia Gecseg, Visual Collections Records Specialist at The National Archives (TNA), who shares stories from their perhaps lesser-known Visual Collections, including some Victorian creative problem-solving to odour. We'll learn more about some of the visual material that TNA hold, why they have them, and how you can explore them!  Research guides for: Registered designs:...

Welcome to Season 2 of Outside the Box - a podcast about archives and the wonders they contain! We're carrying on this with with part two of of a wonderful story of collaboration, community engagement and creative responses to archives with  Suffolk Archives  and  Orchestras Live .  Join us, Hannah Salisbury, and Stuart Bruce to hear all about two brilliant projects inspired by items from from the...

Welcome to Season 2 of Outside the Box - a podcast about archives and the wonders they contain! We're kicking off this new season with a wonderful story of collaboration, community engagement and creative responses to archives with Suffolk Archives and Orchestras Live .  Join us in conversation with Hannah Salisbury and Stuart Bruce to hear all about two brilliant projects inspired by items from f...

#CrowdCymru is funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and run jointly by Gwent Archives, Glamorgan Archives and Cardiff University Special Collections & Archives. We are a PILOT digital archives volunteer project, everything our volunteers do is online via a bilingual, digital, crowd sourcing platform. This platform, established by the National Library Wales, allows remote volunteers, anywhe...

Join us in conversation with Suzanne Rose, Engagement Manager from the Mass Observation Archive, to hear more about the MOA's engagement projects, directives, the voices of those within the archive.  The Mass Observation Archive specialises in material about everyday life in Britain. It contains papers generated by the original Mass Observation social research organisation (1937 to early 1950s), a...

The Mass Observation Archive specialises in material about everyday life in Britain. It contains papers generated by the original Mass Observation social research organisation (1937 to early 1950s), and newer material collected continuously since 1981 (Mass Observation Project). The Archive is a Charitable Incorporated Organisation in the care of the University of Sussex. It is housed at The Keep...

Join us in conversation with (part of!) the team from Avebury and Alexander Keiller Museum to learn more about the archives and Avebury Papers project.  The Avebury Papers is an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project to digitise, explore, and share the archive of Avebury's Neolithic origins and its subsequent life-history. Part of this research involves making finds and documentation...

Archivist and witer, Rhoda Boateng, shares the stories of Black mental health inniatives held within the the Black Cultural Archives - particularly the work and legacy of Melba Wilson. The collection of Melba Wilson's papers spans over 40 years of her work in national and regional mental health programmes, policy units and services, including grassroots and community activism alongside formal poli...

Archivist Hope Fulton has just begun to explore and catalogue the over 300 boxes of archive material at Riverside Studios. In this episode we find out about the history of the Studios from TV and film with iconic programmes like TGIFriday to stand out theatre performances from stars in the making. You can find out more about Riverside Studios here .  

The Circus and the Fair are coming to town. In this epsiode we take a dazzling look behind the scenes with the NFCA's Collection Manager, Aruntzia Barrutia, and learn about social value of the fairground to further education in 19th century Britian, its role in promoting female boxing, and the technological innovations it helped develop and showcase. Artunzia also shares stories from their living...

An intriguing look at staff records at one of the grandest stately homes of England. Dr Alexa Frost, archivist at Blenheim Palace, talks us through the staff database project. A long term project unpicking the history of those who have worked at the palace and on the estate. Much of the archive at Blenheim is private but the staff database will eventually be a searchable resource for those with fa...

Dan Copley (Archivist), Jack Bennett (Archive Intern) and Grace Marks (PhD Student and Graduate Teaching Assistant) from Edge Hill University help us explore the student records and friendship books from the end of the 19th Century and beginning of the 20th Century. These wonderful records from a time when the University was an all-women non-denominational teacher training college give a fascinati...

David Powell, Archives Manager, talks iconic comics but also gives a rounder view of this long-established Dundee media company world famous for publishing the Beano but less known for its range of local newspapers, magazines such as the People's Friend (still going) and the teen read of a certain age: Jackie. You can find out more about some of the D C Thomson exhibitions here: Beano: The Art of...

Mari Takayanagi, Senior Archivist, highlights the stories of suffragettes and suffragists from within the UK Parliamentry Archives. Listen in to find out why Jeremy Corbyn was tiptoeing through parliament with an electric drill and how you get a banner through a metal grill! You can find out more about the Parliamentary Archives here .

Project Archivist, Alex Cowan, gives us an overview of the disability arts movement and how the archive tells the stories of the inspirational people who have been involved in it over the years. You can find out more about those people and their stories here  https://the-ndaca.org/ The archive can be visited by appointment – please contact  AlexCowan@shapearts.org.uk  the first instance with any e...

If you thought that live streaming theatre performances came in with the internet then you are in for a surprise! Natasha Kitcher has been researching the Electrophone – the first UK based theatre (and church service) streaming device from the late 19 th century. Its history is kept in the BT archive and Anne Archer (Head of BT Group Archives) and Natasha tell the story of this and some other earl...

JoJo Kirtley, Founder & Co-Artistic Director of Workie Ticket Theatre tells the story of how, over the course of several lockdowns she worked with the communities of North Tyneside to ensure that their voices and their stories of the COVID-19 pandemic would be part of the future history of our times. Listen in to find out how she did it and why Workie Ticket Theatre won the Community Archives and...

A podcast about archives and the wonders they contain coming this Friday. Join us this Friday, December 2nd  2022, for our first episode as Zoe Reid, Keeper of the National Archives in Ireland, tells the story of how the Public Record Office was destroyed in 1922, and how one hundred years later the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland has recreated a significant part of the lost records.  Outside t...