Gloucestershire Archives
Reasons for nomination
We run a strong and well-respected accredited archives service covering the counties of Gloucestershire and South Gloucestershire. Over the last 18 months we have collaborated and worked in partnership with a wide range of people and organisations to deliver innovative and impactful projects and are keen to share the results with the wider sector.
About us
Our core team of 16 FTE local authority staff are based within the recently expanded and refurbished Gloucestershire Heritage Hub building in Gloucester where we work alongside our heritage partners, Gloucestershire Police Archives, Gloucestershire Family History Society, the Copy Certificates (Registration) Service and Voices Gloucester.
We are constantly seeking new ways to broaden our appeal and engage with our users. Our staff have access to all types of training, from in-house mentoring to external courses, which helps spark creativity, deepen knowledge and ultimately improve our visitor experience. This ethos is demonstrated by the recent successful training bid, Skilling up the South West 2025, a regional project kindly funded by The National Archives (TNA) but written and led by Gloucestershire Archives staff. We take pride in being an outward-looking service, open to ideas and equally willing to share our expertise with others. As a result of the bid, over the next few months we will be coordinating requested learning sessions with or involving colleagues from local authority repositories across the SW region and then sharing conclusions.
Our staff are also invited to take part in County Council exchange visits with other departments, which not only helps spread the word about our service but also enhances the personal development of our staff, who, consequently, feel invested in their place of work.
For the past 18 months, we have been fortunate to have a level 3 apprentice working in our Access & Engagement Team. In May 2025 we were specifically chosen to host a visit of the LMP Education Apprenticeship tutors who came from London and Wales, to learn more about archival theory and practice.
The Green Pledge Project
In October 2023 we started our latest major Lottery funded project (the Green Pledge Project). This £246,800 project focuses on cataloguing large environmental collections and developing community-led collecting initiatives whilst reducing the carbon footprint of our service and those we engage through activities.
The Green Pledge project continues for a few more months, but the list of achievements so far is impressive.
Over 9000 maps and plans deposited by the Environment Agency have been catalogued and are now searchable for the first time.
A series of thought-provoking podcasts on environmental matters has been produced and our ‘dynamic collecting’ approach has resulted in new environmental archives being deposited.
Solar panels have been installed on the archives building
From January 2024 onwards, we have been working with We Are Project Grow community interest company and the Wiggly charity to grow fruit and vegetables in the Gloucestershire Heritage Hub community garden, empowering local people.
Our in-house accredited conservators have been testing and developing passive storage to create safer and more stable environments for our archive strongrooms. They recently ran an HVAC (heating, ventilation, air conditioning) shut-down workshop for conservators and wrote a case study for TNA.
In June 2025, the work of the Green Pledge Project was further showcased at the Cheltenham Science Festival with 5230 people, many of them school children visiting our joint installation with Project Grow. Our colourful garden shed featuring archival images is now permanently housed in the garden at Kingsholm Primary School.
For further information on our Green Pledge Project please see here. and an ARA Environment Group case study here.
Partnership working – contributing to, and benefitting from, the wider archive and heritage sector locally, regionally and nationally
Partnership working is at our core, helping us increase our impact and address challenges collaboratively.
Locally, our Head of Service helped establish, and until last month, led Gloucester Heritage Forum, a group with over 40 representatives from heritage-focused organisations in and around Gloucester, all seeking opportunities for shared engagement.
Our most recent collaboration with the Museum in the Park in Stroud enabled us to contribute to the display ‘The Business of Stroud Scarlet’ telling the story of the famous Stroud scarlet and ‘saved list’ cloth through the records of the dyers, clothiers and carriers who were involved in its international trade. From the import of cochineal dye from South America to the journey the cloth went on as it left Stroud, the display presented a rare opportunity to see the records displayed in front of the Wallbridge painting depicting the workings of the cloth business at the heart of the town
Regionally, our Service is involved with the Sounds of the South-West heritage lottery funded project, based in Bristol, tackling audio-visual records across the region with expert support and volunteer participation. A recently qualified archivist thoroughly analysed SW archive service annual statistics to understand trends in archives provision. We are also working with Archives South West colleagues to negotiate a way forward for regional newspapers.
Nationally, Our Head of Service, as chair of the Chief Archivists in Local Government Group (CALGG), is leading negotiations about the National Burial Ground Project, to ensure records, valued relationships and income are protected. She is also contributing to a CALGG project on records of adopted and care-experienced people, now focusing on ensuring records from ‘line of business’ systems can be preserved for the long-term. Our Heads of Collections and Access & Engagement are both now trained to help with archives accreditation visits, acting as peer reviewers. Our staff regularly contribute to regional and national workshops and conferences and two colleagues will be contributing to the ARA conference in Bristol this year. In January 2024, we were delighted to host the National Lottery Heritage Fund’s away day for their London and South-East colleagues.
We were glad to help colleagues at the Media Archive of Central England (MACE) when they needed to temporarily relocate their entire collection. We have benefited in-kind as several staff have received training on specialist film equipment, including our apprentice, who is now engaged in opening up unseen footage within our collections for his final assessment.
Sustainability and dynamic collecting
We love our collections and hold many significant archives, including an 18th century work song sung by the enslaved in sugar plantations in Barbados, a manuscript which appears on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. Last year, this document inspired local black artists to create an art installation called ‘Beating Back the Past’ displayed within Gloucester Cathedral, and co-created an associated conference. The song manuscript also featured in high-profile exhibitions at the Wellcome Collection in London and the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, September 2024 to June 2025.
Our literary, asylum, business and Kindertransport collections also have an international reputation and attract frequent visitors to our site or generate interest via our enquiries service. The Kindertransport collection has a local relevance to our site, as the hostel used for children escaping Nazi Germany is close to the archive building. A son of one of the Kindertransport ‘boys’ described the importance of this collection to himself personally in one of our ‘Why Archives’ films
We have been chosen by the Jewish Refugee Association to host one of three national sessions on the Kindertransport Project in April 2026, the other venues being Manchester and Birmingham.
We are determined to tackle our cataloguing backlog and so have recently added resource to the Collections Management Team, making effective use of the New Burdens funding to employ additional archivists. Currently staff are focussing on cataloguing district council records, a move which we hope will prove beneficial as the county of Gloucestershire awaits a decision on local government review.
As the Diocesan Record Office, we have recently embarked on a joint venture to appraise records of the diocese, the bishop’s office and the now charitable board of education on-site before transfer to the Archives. This supports the diocese with their day-to-day operations and helps ensure the 20th and 21st century archive is as accessible as the early records.
Since 1998 we have had a successful Service Level Agreement (SLA) with South Gloucestershire Council, a unitary authority, to provide an archive service for that area. This is being extended for a further 10 years with an annual inflationary uplift built in, indicating that they are happy with the current provision.
For several years, we have worked to make the records of Gloucestershire County Council - the ‘corporate archive’ - fully accessible. This means we can quickly respond to queries raised by council colleagues, particularly concerning children in care and comply with all relevant legislation. All records relating to children and young people within this archive were comprehensively catalogued as part of our Corporate Safeguarding Project, which was highlighted as an example of good practice by colleagues involved with the IICSA inquiry and the Memory, Identify, Rights in Records (MIRRA) Project at University College London.
Last April, we held an event on the corporate archive and developed a series of index drawers, called the ‘cabinet of curiosities.’ This was a fun and interactive display, with each drawer featuring a function of the county council. This event was well received, and we continue to use the cabinet at internal and external events to promote our work and our council. It was particularly useful at the recent induction event in May 2025 for new councillors and featured prominently on our information stand.
We are always keen to collect oral histories of departing councillors and leaders of county and district councils to bring to life our core administrative records. Staff have been trained to collate oral histories and run sessions for community groups to make their own recordings. It is also a privilege to be involved in putting material into the archives as a reparative justice exercise, most recently with the Gloucestershire Fire and Rescue Service.
We have a robust set of policies, as you would expect from any accredited service, but these help us to have a strong proactive approach to collecting. We have a 10-year cataloguing plan which ensures we make time to do strategic thinking about the collections, as well as focusing on the day-to-day delivery of our service. We now have four archivists in our Collections Team who specialize in digital archives meaning that we are poised and ready for deposits of born-digital collections and we work in tandem with our accredited conservators who are experts at preventative packaging and strongroom controls. The completion of a successful project in March 2025 meant that we have now provided protective enclosures for 1408 outsize volumes with the help of Glamorgan Archives and their box making machine.
Finally, we have large number of volunteers, which peaked at over 200 but now is consistently between 70 and 80 active volunteers each quarter. They support our service, listing records, packaging records, enhancing catalogue descriptions, listening to recordings and transcribing records and much more. They are invaluable in terms of their output but also in their support. They often attend events or help publicise our work. We are most grateful for their support.
Open to all… Community engagement and Public Sector Equalities Duty
Since June 2022, Saturdays have been transformed from a day when few researchers visited to lively once-a-month partnership events. We offer a varied programme of heritage themed activities with our onsite partner, Gloucestershire Family History Society and many other local groups and individuals. For these events alone we have collaborated with more than 200 organisations and our achievements have now been noticed by other archive services who are reaching out for advice. We regularly get capacity audiences (70) and run talks twice when demand exceeds the room capacity. The aim is to raise our profile, have popular appeal and get people onto the site, as the first step in the pyramid of engagement. We also continue to host our popular online talks, known as Secrets Revealed, also based on themes, the content of which feeds into our growing bank of online exhibitions, which attract an even wider audience.
Voices Gloucester
Over the last 3 years we’ve developed an inspiring partnership with Voices Gloucester, which grew out of City Voices (led by our Head of Service) as part of Gloucester History Festival. By building on relationships, establishing a community panel and offering small grants, we have worked with very diverse communities co-creating grass-roots projects. Highlights include heritage-inspired art installations in a social housing tower block due for demolition which attracted over 1000 very local visitors, LGBTQ+ workshops and events, an exhibition by a talented homeless photographer and Romany oral histories and exhibition. A summary of the impact of Voices Gloucester partnership activities can be viewed here.
Heritage Schools and further opportunities for learning
Developed with funding from Historic England and Voices Gloucester, we now have an established schools’ programme, known as ‘Heritage Schools’ regularly holding teacher training events and developing learning packages for children aged between 7 and18 in Gloucester. In both 2023 and 2024 six primary schools were engaged in creating school-based exhibitions and produced a child’s eye view of Gloucester leaflet. In June 2024, each city school produced a film on the history of their school and were then awarded a blue plaque for their school building. For the past two years, we have also held a heritage conference day with over one hundred secondary school pupils gathering at the local university. TV presenter and historian Tracy Borman featured as the headline speaker and breakout workshops covered topics such as fake news and oral history.
We produce a half-termly newsletter, delivered to 333 schools countywide. Also, the ‘university modules’ for year 6 primary students have been re-introduced and extended to termly activity. Introductions for university students have also been re-imagined with a supported visit as they start their research modules. This approach has been more successful in achieving follow-up research visits. Further information on the Heritage Schools programme is available here.
We held a second Heritage Focus Day at the Heritage Hub in June 2024 with partners, supplementing our traditional work experience offer and providing an additional way for young people or career changers to find out more about a wide range of careers in heritage sector. In November 2024 we hosted a further visit of the trainee mental health nurses, based at the University of Gloucestershire medical faculty, specifically highlighting our internationally renowned collection of mental health and asylum records which have also featured in another of our ‘Why Archives’ film series - Why Archives? Looking at Gloucester's Asylum Records - YouTube
We work hard to be an inclusive and accessible service for all and were recently awarded a five-star (the best) accessibility rating from Accessibility Gloucestershire. We have appointed a member of staff as an ‘Accessibility Champion’ for our Service.
We are particularly excited by a new venture we are developing called ‘Reading the Records.’ which will make our collections accessible to blind and visually impaired visitors. In June 2025 we ran a successful pilot session with representatives from the Sight-loss Council and Gloucester’s Talking Newspaper. There was a touch tour of the ‘tools of the trade’, a description of our oldest document with an explanation of the seals and a tour of the facilities. We are now busy planning a series of sessions in the autumn encompassing different types of records.
Conclusion
We are grateful to someone from outside our service for suggesting this nomination. Looking back on what has been achieved has been a positive experience!
Sample feedback:
Long-standing volunteer EJ describes Gloucestershire Archives as ‘my happy place’.
Depositor: Mr X was very complimentary about the team in general and Z in particular and said how well he had been looked after through the process of depositing his records.
Apprenticeship tutors: I also wanted to thank you so much for such a great day - you really made us feel so welcome and special, and I am sure I can speak for us all in that we had a really good insight into what you do on a day to day basis and your enthusiasm and passion for your projects and items is infectious!
Sight Loss Council collaborators: Thank you so much for taking the time to meet with us yesterday. It was absolutely fascinating to learn about the archives and as Anne said, "it was a real eye opener". What you pulled together for us was so interesting and I certainly learnt an incredible amount. Anne and I have a SLC [Sight Loss Council] meeting tonight with the rest of the team, so we will be sure to sing your praises. [This accompanied most helpful practical advice on how to make the sessions more impactful for those with visual impairments].
International cultural ambassador’s comment about Bajan song: ‘It is perhaps one of the most important things I’ve ever found for us in my life…. The moment I saw that song I didn’t just see a piece of paper…. I saw my whole ancestry.’