Greater London

London School of Economics (LSE) – Library Archives and Special Collections Team

Archivists at LSE collaborated with the Library’s Learning and Engagement team and Arts & Homelessness International to welcome three artists with lived experience of homelessness. Through a series of creative workshops, the artists were invited to explore stories of homelessness within archival collections and to question traditional collecting practices, the language used in historical material to describe marginalised communities, and the biases and omissions in cataloguing. The artists then developed original artworks in response.

Girlguiding

Girlguiding launched a new heritage display at their headquarters in May 2025, marking the first opportunity for collection interpretation and engagement since 2012. Visitors can explore various aspects of the youth organisation’s history, including the findings from their work on being a pioneering organisation for girls’ and women’s empowerment.  Updated biannually, the display currently features photographs of the earliest Guides through to the 1990s uniform designed with girls.

Library, Archives and Learning Services at University of East London (UEL)

UEL became the fifth UK institution to be awarded Olympic Studies Research Centre status by the International Olympic Committee for its British Olympic Association Archive which records the history of Britain’s engagement with the Olympic Games movement since 1906, including all three London Olympic Games. This status is providing improved national and international opportunities for UEL students and academics including engagement activities with local schools in Newham.

London Metropolitan University (LMU) – Library Services and Special Collections

Students from LMU’s BA Product and Furniture Design course developed an interactive Memory Box inspired by The Archive of the Irish in Britain. Each of the nine RFID-tagged objects triggers playback of a unique oral history recording, creating a multisensory storytelling experience. Funded by the charity Irish in Britain, the final design now supports outreach with Irish elder community groups across London, promoting reminiscence, wellbeing, and cultural connection.

Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability (RHN) Archive Service

To mark their 170th anniversary, the RHN launched ‘A Legacy of Care’, a National Lottery Heritage funded project exploring the Hospital’s history. Patients, trained in oral history techniques, conducted interviews with others from the Hospital community. Historical patient stories, uncovered from new archival research, were brought to life by professional actors with disabilities, alongside hospital staff, volunteers, and patients. These scenes, and the filmed interviews, have since been shaped into a documentary film.

The Wiener Holocaust Library

To mark Holocaust Memorial Day 2025, the Wiener Holocaust Library launched a new online portal, Wiener Digital Collections, putting significant collections from their unique archive at the hands of researchers worldwide. For the past year they have continued to add newly digitised collections to the site, now totalling 215,000 pages of crucial evidence.

Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives

Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives hosted the major exhibition, ‘Cockney Rebels: Popular Music in Tower Hamlets (1624-2003)’. This first-of-its-kind exhibition charted four centuries of pop music history in London’s East End, from ancient folk ballads to the birth of grime in the early 2000s. The exhibition attracted 2,302 visitors in total and 573 people attended the events programme.