City of Westminster Archives
Reasons for nomination:
I am delighted to nominate Westminster Archives for the Record Keeping Service of the Year Award.
The team at Westminster demonstrate outstanding teamwork, ensuring delivery of a high-quality service, including thorough responses to enquiries, and comprehensive support for researchers accessing the collection on site 5 days a week. Each member brings a unique set of skills, working collaboratively to achieve the highest standards with the community at the heart of their efforts.
Beyond their daily responsibilities, Westminster Archives has made significant contributions through impactful projects and partnerships. Their initiatives ensure that everyone has the opportunity to be heard and to learn about Westminster’s history in meaningful and relevant ways. The team’s dedication and high output are truly commendable, and they all support each other to reach these collective outcomes.
Highlights from the last 18 months include:
Black & Blue Project: Over the last 18 months the Black & Blue project has moved from pilot to full delivery. With funding from Public Health, Westminster Archives developed and delivered a drug prevention initiative which educates Year 6 children in Westminster and Kensington & Chelsea on drug addiction and other themes such as racism, poverty, homelessness, and health. Through the story of Chelsea FC’s first Black footballer, Paul Cannoville, children use primary sources and activities in their programme workbook, and based on their classroom learning, put on an end of programme performance.
Moving Away Your Dust: Funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, this project explores the history of waste management in London. Key Stage 2 children recorded oral history interviews, created animations, delivered musical performances, and have been Mudlarking on the Thames. Other project outputs include a display and VR revisualisation of the Grosvenor Canal, an integral part of the waste management story for London. The featured classroom learning using archive sources to explore themes such as public health crises, Victorian innovation, migration, class, recycling and sustainability. The programme has been such a success it has received additional funding from the council and other partners to reach more children in Westminster and Kensington & Chelsea.
Threads of Elegance: The team successfully secured more National Lottery Heritage Fund support for this project, which using the archives of Beale & Inman will unite communities through learning about textiles and traditional crafts in the coming year. The project will also see conservation work undertaken on fragile volumes of tailor’s records, stabilising them and ensuring future access to records from the company who were an integral part of the histories of Saville Row, London and British male fashion.
Westminster LGBTQ+ Forum Partnership: To help raise the profile of lesser heard histories and strengthen community relationships in the borough, a new partnership with the Westminster LGBTQ+ Forum was created to platform queer history through an events programme and raising awareness for the importance of preserving memories and experiences in the archives.
Westminster at War Exhibition: Collaboration with volunteers and Ancestry.com to create this small exhibition in Westminster City Hall which opened up our amazing Civil Defence collection, including with low cost solutions to enable the manuscript notebook of author William Sansom, to become digitally browsable in the exhibition.
Corporate Archive Days: The team piloted and developed a new corporate social responsibility model for businesses to spend the day at the archives. It was piloted with one of our depositing businesses so that staff could learn about their history and contribute to making their collections accessible for public use. The offer has now been publicly rolled out for other local businesses to take up.
Community Mini-hubs: As Westminster Council looked to set up community mini-hubs in two of our libraries, the archives team provided memory labs equipment and training for sessions to be run at the mini-hubs. Memory Labs is an innovative programme of community digitisation, adapted from the American self-service digitisation model.
Volunteer Support: The service has always had a strong team of volunteers and in the last 12 months supported 49 volunteers who contributed over 2200 hours to the archives in a range of mostly collection-based roles.
New Collections: The team worked closely with The National Archives, Business Archives Council and the South West Heritage Trust to transfer the extensive Debenhams collection, spanning 250 years of history, to Westminster. Liaising with administrators, other archive services and other stakeholders an important collection has been relocated and plans underway to make it accessible to researchers.
College Park Takeover Day: Every year the service welcomes in students from a school to “take over” the archives by undertaking conservation work and assisting with research in the Searchroom. This year the service welcomed in a mixed age group from College Park, a local school for children with autism and complex learning needs. Activities were developed to meet the wide range of needs in the group and an engaging and hands on day was had by all attendees.
Westminster Archives’ unwavering commitment to excellence, community engagement and inclusivity makes them a deserving candidate for this award. They bring archives alive and continually strive to safeguard and find new ways to engage local people with their heritage.
Supporting evidence of service delivery excellence
Moving Away Your Dust Moving Away Your Dust website
Black & Blue Black and Blue summary film
Images:
WW2 Exhibition at Westminster City Hall;
Take Over Day 2024;
Moving Away Your Dust
Statement from Leanne Bellot, Head of Libraries & Archives:
“I would like to support Westminster Archives for this award. The team bring to life the incredible history of the area in innovative and engaging ways, while safeguarding it for future generations. The team has gone from strength to strength in recent years, and raised the profile of the service across the borough and within the council. For a small service they make a big impact and do amazing work for their communities”