Back in April Dorset History Centre was awarded £603,777 by the National Lottery Heritage Fund to begin to develop a project which will result in the expansion of our repositories, the re-shaping of the public entrance to the building, and a whole range of outreach and engagement activities.
Since then things have been busy, as we have begun to lay the platform for the work happening in the development phase of the project. This has involved recruitment of project staff, and the beginning of different activities in different parts of the county.
This month, we want to bring you up-to-speed with what we have been doing since April, and how the project has been progressing in the nearly six months since the project began.
Any large project can feel like rolling a boulder down a hill – to begin with there is not much to show for all the effort being exerted, but as time goes on, the pace of change picks up and before you know it the boulder is bounding onwards, picking up pace as it goes! It is the job of Claire Skinner (Dorset History Centre’s Principal Archivist), as one of the project managers of Past Lives, Future Proofed (on the community engagement side) to help steer the boulder and keep it moving in the right direction. Claire helps report on the project to our main funder, the National Lottery Heritage Fund, draw down funding at intervals, and liaise with colleagues and consultants to make sure we are on track to deliver what we’ve said we will, within a reasonable timeframe.
Community Engagement
Past Lives, Future Proofed will expand storage space for archives (currently 96% full); improve public facilities; and widen collections and audiences for archives through a range of community engagement activities. There are four main strands to our activity programme – Digital Leader, Mind the Gaps, Archives for Arts’ Sake and Life and Crimes. These strands were covered in our last blog, so we won’t elaborate on them here. Each strand contains about four or five distinct areas of work as well as overarching tasks such as the recruitment of a Project Advisory Group to help monitor our attempts to be more inclusive and welcoming, public consultation, and refreshing our volunteer policies and procedures in line with national standards. In total there are about 24 distinct areas of work on which we will be reporting back in due course. The work we are doing in this development phase is important for testing methodologies and ideas in preparation for creating our delivery phase activities, which will dovetail with the main capital works in 2028-2031.
Between April and August 2026 we have recruited key staff and consultants to help us carry out our development phase action plan. We have recruited two new members of staff who are both on 18 month contracts: Debbie Clarke, Project Community Engagement Officer, who joined us in mid-July; and Kat Broomfield, Project Archivist, who joined us in mid-August. We have also recruited our evaluation consultants, Flying Geese Ltd, who will help monitor the effectiveness of our project. Evaluation is an essential part of any National Lottery funded project and they will work with us hopefully across the entirety of our project, from development to delivery.
We have also recruited Kate Richardson, an Oral History Consultant and Project Facilitator, who will help us with our Oral History Centre of Excellence and with delivering training across various strands; Bea Sieradzka and Maria Gayton, Oral Historians (GRT communities) who will work with Kushti Bok to collect oral histories from GRT communities in Dorset as part of our “Mind the Gaps” strand; and The Inclusion Agency who will work as Education Consultants as part of the “Archives for Arts’ Sake” strand, helping to improve our engagement with children and young people.
During this time we have also made strides in our Photographing Pride project, involving young people taking photographs of Pride events across the county, as a historic record; and our Lighthouse archiving project (more shortly) as well as preparations for other pieces of work for which others are better placed to report back.
Capital Works
Running alongside the community engagement strands are our exciting plans to expand our storage and improve public facilities. In July we received approval to proceed from Dorset Council Cabinet who agreed to underwrite the £5.28 m project in the event of a £95k shortfall (which we are hoping in any event to address with fundraising.) On 2 October we met our building design team, Spase Architects and Surveyors, who will be responsible for bringing the project from RIBA Stage 2 (concept design) to RIBA stage 4 (technical design) by March 2028. This will pave the way for the actual building works in 2028-2031.
We are conscious of wanting to involve stakeholders in the design of improvements to our public facilities, and our Project Advisory Group will be integral to this as well as wider public consultation in due course.
Archives for Arts Sake: Lighthouse Project
Now that the Lighthouse archive has arrived at DHC, we’ve been amalgamating the amazing box lists produced by the Lighthouse volunteers so that we can start to make a draft arrangement for the archive catalogue. We’ve enjoyed delving into the programme boxes, especially those of the early days of Poole Arts Centre. Some of the local 1980’s advertising on the reverse of the programmes have been a fun surprise too!
Archives for Arts Sake: Photographing Pride
“Everyone at each pride was so nice, [and it was] some of the most fun I have had for a long while”.– Jade
“[I] liked getting the opportunity to go to events I wouldn’t have felt confident to attend”– Esme
Archives for Arts Sake: Arts for Memory
Life and Crimes: Quarter Sessions Indexing Project
The recruitment process for the Life and Crimes Quarter Sessions Indexing Project has now ended. We’d like to say a huge thank you to everyone who has applied and shown so much enthusiasm for the project. There was unprecedented interest in this project, and whilst we can only take on a limited number of people at this stage, there will be further opportunities to contribute to this project in the future. We will be getting in touch with volunteers over the next couple of weeks to update on the application process – watch this space!
