The Archive project was part of our ‘Radical Retrospectives’ strand of work, which ran from March 2024 until November 2025. It was funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, with a related Festival and Company Development Programme also funded by Arts Council England and Granada Foundation. The Archive Website was co-created in a series of workshops that ran throughout that time. A group of our participants, the Participant Research Group, worked with all our programme participants to develop the principles that we felt were most important in building our Archive.

We decided that:

  • There isn’t just one story; there are many
  • We wanted to tell these stories ‘from below’ (we called this ‘an insurgent archive’)
  • We spoke of arranging the information in spirals, or like a river, or a constellation of stars, but also that sometimes information should be arranged in a ‘boring’ way, as some people prefer this.
  • The website and archive must be accessible to all, on the cheapest devices, especially mobile phones.
  • It must be ‘neurodivergent’, offering different ways of arranging the information to suit all types of mind and ways of thinking.
  • We decided to create “Heritage Police”, who pop up in short videos at random to provoke thought on the role of the archive.
  • We also want to create “Guides” – short videos of our participants explaining how to use the archi.ve

We are grateful to all those involved in helping us:

Every effort has been made to check that we have permission to use the resources displayed in the archive. However, if you or someone you know is represented here and you do not wish to be, please let us know.

Please contact admin@collective-encounters.org.uk with as much detail as possible and we will look into it. You can also refer to our complaints policy.

“We are all unique and important, if we don’t tell our stories, they are lost in time”
From the project launch event June 2024