Engagement Grants funded in 2024–2025
In 2024–2025 our Engagement Grants programme had the theme of 'Community'. Here are the proposals that were awarded grants, to help connect archives with their communities and the wider public.
Aunt Nell Ltd
Aunt Nell Ltd is an independent podcast production company that will use their engagement grant to delve into the archive of Press for Change, which started fighting for trans rights in the 1990s, and commission four trans sound artists.
“We’re thrilled to receive this grant to support us in making a unique sound installation about UK transgender history. The work will connect us all to UK trans history, through the power of sound and memory, bringing a pivotal archive out into the open.
Tash Walker, Director
For all legal purposes this woman is a man. Thus: she cannot be raped. If arrested, it is likely she would be sent to a men's prison. She cannot retire on a state pension until 65. She cannot marry her boyfriend. She can be dismissed from her job merely for existing. She has no right to a private life. "Press for Change" wants this woman to have the civil rights that are automatically granted to every other female citizen. PFC. BM Network, London, WC1N 3XX.
An example of a document from the Press for Change archive.
Equal Arts
The Engagement Grant will enable the team at Equal Arts to run a new project called ‘Creative Newcastle and the Crawhalls.’ The team will be working with people living with dementia and carers to co-develop a set of dementia-friendly reading resources inspired by the Crawhall collection at Newcastle City Library.
People living with dementia often stop reading because conventional books are too complex in terms of content and narrative, but archival documents such as letters, when curated in the right way, can offer a satisfying reading experience which stimulates curiosity and imagination without cognitive overload. We are grateful to The National Archives for enabling this work, which forms part of our wider Reading with Dementia programme with Newcastle Libraries, supported by Arts Council England.
Douglas Hunter, CEO
Flintham Museum
The Flintham Museum will be launching a project based on the unsold contents of Whites Stores in Flintham, Nottinghamshire, which were discovered in 1990. This includes hundreds of documents and items about food rationing from 1940-1954. Using documents as a starting point, the project will look at how Flintham residents ate during difficult times. Activities based on food during three time periods (1940-1954, 2020, and in the future) will be organised for all age groups.
Firstly, ration books will be distributed to 250 households and residents will be invited to devise recipes using foods available during and just after World War Two. Secondly, memories of shopping and eating during the 2020 Covid lockdown will be captured for future generations to discover. Finally, people will be invited to think about what they would eat in the event of a future conflict by partaking in local walks led by a professional forager. Through these walks, unexpected foods in and around the village will be found, gathered and turned into edible items for people to take home and eat. The project will end with a community picnic when locally made food reflecting the three time periods will be prepared and shared.
Acquiring, preparing and eating food is something we all do every day but we rarely think about how previous generations coped when food was scarce or actively consider what we would do if there was a future conflict which affected food supplies. We reckon this project will encourage us to look backwards and forwards and think differently about an everyday activity.
Susan Clayton, Volunteer Curator
Museum of Youth Culture
Camden Calling is an exciting new partnership between the Museum of Youth Culture, Camden Local Studies & Archives Centre and London Borough of Camden. Welcoming two major milestones, Museum of Youth Culture opening its first permanent space in Camden and the borough celebrating its 60th birthday, Camden Calling will invite an artist into the archives to uncover untold stories with the local community. Alongside a series of community archiving events, the artist will co-produce a piece for the public realm.
As we prepare to open the world’s first Museum of Youth Culture in Camden, it is vital that our archive speaks to the local community. This project enables us to champion Camden’s rich history and start to directly engage the community in how they want their stories to be told.
Jo Swinstead, Founder for Camden Calling
Wigan Council
Archives: Wigan & Leigh will offer seven to eleven year olds in their local area a chance to engage with archival collections through digital workshops. This project, delivered in partnership with education company Computer Xplorers, will be comprised of eight sessions across the 2025 Summer holidays.
This successful funding bid will help us to bring our heritage to life for local children this summer holidays. As part of our popular holiday activities, young people will have the opportunity to explore our archive collections and build their skills in stop motion animation, video making and more.
Councillor Chris Ready, Cabinet Portfolio Holder for Communities at Wigan Council
Mulberry Bush
Mulberry Bush Organisation will use their grant to roll out archives-based workshops to different settings within the care sector. The workshops, co-produced alongside care-experienced adults, will be informed by archival examples of care records which will form the basis for redacted poetry and creative writing.
We are thrilled to receive this Engagement Grant from The National Archives. This will help us to highlight the voices of care-experienced adults and tell us more about what it’s like to be at the receiving end of the recordkeeping process.
Debra Doggett, Senior Archivist
Cornwall Council
‘We are Cornwall’s communities’ is a collaborative project between Kresen Kernow, Cornwall’s archive centre and disAbility Cornwall on behalf of Cornwall Lived Experience Partnership (CLEP). The aim of the project is to work with community members to co-curate an exhibition at Kresen Kernow for the summer of 2025. The exhibition will explore what members of CLEP feel is important about Cornwall’s past and will involve archive stories that can inform a positive and inclusive future in Cornwall.
We are really excited that this grant enables us to work with disAbility Cornwall on this exciting exhibition and offer paid opportunities to community members to get involved in archive curation
Alice Howard, Interpretation and Participation Lead
West Yorkshire Archive Service
West Yorkshire Archive Service will work with the South Asian community in Wakefield to share, promote and better understand local collections. The funding will enable them to reach out to hyperlocal audiences around West Yorkshire History Centre in Wakefield and support them to explore stories within the archive’s collections relating to their unique histories within Wakefield. They will also celebrate South Asian History Month (SAHM) in July and August 2025 with a number of outreach activities and creative opportunities to explore archive collections.
This project will allow us to explore new ways of joint working and of co-curating with our local communities to develop a deeper understanding of our collections and the community stories embedded within them. Archives are the keepers of stories. By sharing and preserving the stories of Wakefield’s South Asian community, we can help make existing collections more accessible to diverse communities, helping to enrich our heritage and make it more representative of the people of Wakefield.
Councillor Melanie Jones, Chair West Yorkshire Joint Services Committee
Oxfordshire Health Archives
The Oxford Health Charity, the Oxford Health Arts Partnership and Oxfordshire Health Archives will mark the bicentenary of the Warneford Hospital in 2026 with their project, ‘Warneford 200’. The engagement grant will fund a series of creative workshops for users of mental health services and members of the local community to be held in Oxford, Banbury, Woodstock, Didcot and Abingdon.
During the workshops, which will be led by an artist from the Oxford Health Arts Partnership, participants will be asked to respond creatively to stories about the Warneford over the past 200 years, and to materials from the archives. Their artwork or creative writing will be included in the Warneford 200 exhibition, planned to tour Oxfordshire during 2026.
We are immensely grateful to The National Archives for supporting this project. This will bring the history of the Warneford Hospital to contemporary life and highlight the importance of the creative therapeutic link to mental health
Dr Karl Marlowe, Chief Medical Officer, Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust
OHA WP 57. An engraving of the front of the Warneford Hospital (then known as the Oxford Lunatic Asylum) published by J. Fisher in 1824; this became the back of the hospital in 1877.
Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse
This project will explore the little-known history of Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse’s site during 1945, focusing particularly on local lived experience, to coincide with the anniversary year of VE and VJ Days. The research that volunteers will undertake, with expert training from the Norfolk Record Office (NRO), will directly inform two public engagement events, highlighting the impact of this specific moment in history and social changes for Norfolk in the period.
The project will provide an invaluable opportunity for volunteer and staff training through NRO’s expertise and facilitate the creation of a robust research pack for ongoing use and extended project legacy – including up to four biographical profiles, shared through costumed interpretation to bring local history to life.
The project aims to humanise the past and offer visitors a more authentic, research-driven perspective, as well as bridging the gap between more academic resources and the audiences who visit Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse with interest in this material but without the skills, confidence or awareness of where to find it. This project will seek to further expand access to and use of the Norfolk Record Office’s wealth of ‘stories’, encouraging engagement with our county’s diverse audiences.
Fiona Ashley, Events Officer
Take Shelter
Take Shelter is a small charity that runs the only wartime school air raid shelter open to the public in the south of England. Their project will focus on civilian VE celebrations in Brighton and Sussex and the military experience of the soldiers of the Royal Sussex Regiment serving in the Far East in VJ Days. It will also look beyond the Second World War to the ways we mark service today including Armed Forces Day and Remembrance.
They will work in partnership with Mass Observation Archive, West Sussex Record Office and the Royal Sussex Regimental Museum, drawing on their archives and bringing together stories in innovative new ways. The project will create an online resource pack for primary schools in consultation with local schools, an exhibition of pop banners which can be used on-site at the shelter and as outreach and digital assets which can be enjoyed via the Take Shelter touchscreen terminals by both school and community visitors.
We are very aware that those who lived through the war will soon no longer be with us. We are looking forward to bringing together the wartime voices from the archives so we can share them with our visitors and encourage them to reflect on what celebration and commemoration meant at the end of the Second World War and what it means to them today.
Michael Button
VE Day Street Party on St Paul’s Street, Brighton, 1945.
Brighton Museum
Spectacle Media
Spectacle Media formed the Silwood Community Video Group in 2001 which has since documented over 350 hours of footage on the social and environmental impacts of regeneration on the Silwood Estate, Rotherhithe.
With this grant, Spectacle Media will run collaborative editing and participatory cataloguing sessions for Silwood community members as part of a Participatory Video Archive Workshop. Engaging with the archive, participants will “crowd catalogue,” working together to create multiple access points to the material from a community-centred perspective. Participants will guide the editing process, helping shape a narrative that preserves Silwood’s history and strengthening community cohesion through a “bottom-up” approach. They will also co-create films, using a participatory filmmaking model that emphasises shared responsibility and skills development. Through digital tools for group decision-making, video editing, and storytelling, participants will use video as a medium for advocacy and local history exploration.
We need this project, too many people don’t know what happened in the past. After the regeneration there were people left but no community. This project might help bring a divided community together.
Doreen Dower, secretary of 40 years of the local tenants' and residents' association