Engagement Grants funded in 2025–2026
In 2025–2026 our Engagement Grants programme had the theme of 'Belonging'. Here are the proposals that were awarded grants, to help connect archives with their communities and the wider public.
Archipelago Arts Collective
Archipelago Arts Collective will work in collaboration with Leeds Industrial Museum to develop a new oral history project exploring intersectional lived experiences of Yorkshire’s industrial past and present. This community-led initiative will capture and preserve testimonies, in response to existing archival material, to challenge the perceptions of technological criticism and Luddism.
Newly created works will be accessioned into the permanent digital collections of both archipelago and Leeds Museums and Galleries. The collected stories will be a central thread of a community-curated exhibition at Leeds Industrial Museum running from 2026 to 2028, diversifying the museum’s interpretation and ensuring that the voices of women, migrant workers, and the working class are central to the region’s industrial narrative.
This grant will enable us to preserve the histories of workers’ rights and technology. We are so excited to use collections to creatively reinterpret and interrogate our relationship with regional industrial heritage. In connecting the relevant, historic legacy of the Luddite uprisings to contemporary criticism around automation and AI through creative intervention, we will create important threads between a history of workers’ rights and our contemporary social challenges.
Seán Ryan, Creative Co-Director of Archipelago Arts Collective
Pishdaad Modaressi Chahardehi
Epworth Old Rectory
The Grade 1 listed house, Epworth Old Rectory, was the childhood home of John and Charles Wesley, founders of the Methodist Movement. The team at Epworth Rectory will deliver a year-long programme bringing together three new audiences — migrant women resettled locally, people living with dementia, and home-educated young people — through shared activities rooted in the history of the house, its gardens and its nationally significant collections.
The Old Rectory will play host to collaborative work with migrant women exploring the ‘Methodist Women in Britain collection’, building towards a new exhibition in 2027. Dementia-friendly sessions will draw on objects and writings to inspire stories and reflections that shape a new sensory garden. This will be developed alongside home-educated children, who will also take part in ‘Museum Take-over’ activities linking directly to history, literacy and the wider curriculum.
Through intergenerational and intercultural exchange, supported by outreach and practical help such as transport, the programme will reduce isolation, widen access to heritage, and strengthen the Old Rectory’s role as a welcoming centre for learning, wellbeing and community connection.
One of our core values is inclusivity and this funding will enable us to open up our collections more widely, particularly with the three audience groups we have identified who might not usually consider visiting a museum such as ours. This work will form a key part of our new Forward Plan, which will improve how we share our stories and heritage into the future.
Sarah Friswell, Chair of Epworth Old Rectory
Epworth Old Rectory
The Exmoor Society
The Exmoor Society will set out on a new archives project to strengthen access to Exmoor’s cultural heritage. The Exmoor Society Archive preserves and cares for collections relating to Exmoor’s artists, writers, archaeologists, environmentalists, historians and photographers. The Archive forms part of The Exmoor Society, a charity established to protect and conserve Exmoor National Park for the benefit of its local communities, visitors, landscapes, wildlife, habitats and cultural heritage.
Among the Archive’s most significant holdings is the collection of Hope Bourne, the Exmoor writer and artist. In partnership with South West Heritage Trust at the Somerset Museum of Rural Life, the Society recently supported a major exhibition exploring Hope Bourne’s life, writing and artwork. This engagement grant will allow them to commission bespoke, portable display cases designed specifically for the safe and professional presentation of archival material.
This exhibition was extremely popular, but difficult for residents of Exmoor itself to visit due to the distance involved and poor public transport links so in 2026 we intend to bring it to an Exmoor location, at the heart of the community where Hope Bourne lived.
These new display cases will not only support the Hope Bourne exhibition but will also form a long-term shared resource, available to small heritage organisations across Exmoor for future displays and community projects.
Lisa Eden, Exmoor Society trustee responsible for the archive
‘Exmoor ponies on Withyhoof Common’ by Hope L. Bourne.
Exmoor Society
The Gardeners’ House
The Gardeners’ House, Penzance, will use their engagement grant to kickstart a project called ‘Seed Stories’. They will explore seeds, native plants and Cornish language alongside a local writer and botanists, developing creative responses with community groups in Penzance.
The project team will produce a handling collection of seeds with images and engaging stories. Local people will also be invited to join in a programme of fun and fascinating activities exploring the incredible world of seeds starting in autumn 2026.
Seeds are something we all recognise. They hold memories of childhood, of family meals and of landscapes that matter to us. This exciting project will provide an opportunity for people of all ages and different places to come together.
Miki Ashton, director of the Gardeners’ House
As a collecting archive, our role is to preserve not only objects but the stories that give them meaning. Seeds may be small, but they carry powerful associations with place, identity and belonging.
Emily Goddard, Collections Manager at the Gardeners’ House
Nature journalling with Natasha McEwan.
The Gardeners’ House, Penzance
Hallé Concert Society
Eileen Simpson and Ben White, Artists and Founders of Open Music Archive, are working with the archive of the Hallé orchestra to develop the project ‘Towards Usership’.
Their aim is to creatively activate historic orchestral recordings from the last 100 years and explore new forms of belonging through archival reuse. The artists will develop a new sound and moving image work, combined with turntablism, to reimagine public‑domain Hallé recordings.
The work will incorporate live manipulation, sampling and performance. Workshop activity with young producers will inform the development of the work, opening out the archive as a space for creative learning and experimentation. The completed artwork will be shared through a public screening and online release under a copyleft licence, extending access to the Hallé’s archive and supporting long‑term engagement with its collections.
As artists, we’re excited to collaborate with the Hallé Archive on this project, which brings historic orchestral recordings into creative dialogue with contemporary practice. The National Archives Engagement Grant opens up new opportunities for the development of our art practice, building on our work with Hallé and partners at Manchester Metropolitan University and University College London. The project will reveal the archive in new ways and invite wider public engagement with these remarkable materials.
Eileen Simpson and Ben White, Artists and Founders of Open Music Archive
Hallé Concert Society
Trafford Council
Trafford Local Studies & Archives (TLSA) will use their engagement grant to launch ‘Our Stories, Our Legacy’ which will deliver three inclusive, archives-based engagement workshops to members of the Trafford African & Caribbean over 50s club (TAC). Content created from the workshops will then feature in an exhibition at the TLSA centre.
The project will support participants to explore, share, and record their life stories and collective histories, strengthening feelings of belonging while addressing the historic under-representation of Caribbean voices within TLSA collections. TAC members are first and second generation immigrants who have played a vital role in shaping the social, cultural, and economic life of Trafford, particularly post-World War Two. However, much of this history remains absent from formal archives and institutional records. This project seeks to address that gap by working collaboratively with TAC to recognise their experiences as pieces of valuable heritage and to ensure they their lived experiences are preserved for future generations to access.
It is such exciting news that TLSA have been awarded this grant to deliver archive-based workshops with local residents. We look forward to delivering them and seeing the results of the conservations and activities planned. This engagement grant helps Trafford to continue delivering culture and heritage for all, a corporate priority for the borough.
Matthew Wilkinson, Trafford Local Studies & Archive Manager
Trafford Local Studies & Archives
University for the Creative Arts (UCA)
UCA will work with Lewisham Heritage Archives on the project, ‘Stall Tales’. to celebrate, and make visible, the history of London’s street markets. Street markets are central to their communities, particularly in Lewisham where the market dates back to the 1890s. It survived attempts by the Council to clear it in the early twentieth century, as well as devasting bombing during the Second World War. The descendants of many of those first licensed to trade in Lewisham market in the 1930s still work there now and the market is an enduring part of the area’s local character.
Evidence for the market’s history exists in the formal council records in the Lewisham Heritage archives, and in the (untapped) memories and family histories of the stallholders. Historians and researchers from University for the Creative Arts will bring these two resources together through citizen-history techniques. They will hold oral history interviews and photo-history workshops which will result in new material for the archives, and public displays to make the history of the market visible in the market itself.
This is an exciting opportunity for Lewisham Heritage to bring awareness to the history of Lewisham Market already living in the archives, and to add new stories, voices, and perspectives to the collection, recording them for Lewisham’s future generations.
Meg Woof, Lewisham Heritage
Lewisham Market, July 2025.
Stall Tales project at UCA/Camille Serisier