Awarded Heritage Centre small grants - August 2024

The Common Room: Northern Coal Shipments, Navigating Global Impact in a Warming World

The Common Room is an archive, charity and heritage venue holding one of the largest public collections of archival material relating to the development of the coal-trade and its allied industries, including shipping. For coal mining to be profitable, the product had to be transported. Shipping coal was key to fuelling industrial expansion from the Northern Coalfields across the country in the 18th century.  

 
The grant will cover volunteer research within our collection to inform a digital exhibition about the exportation of coal and new shipping technologies from the Northeast across the globe. Interpretation will centre around sustainability and assessing the long-term climate impacts. 

National Life Stories: Exploring Innovations in Maritime Safety

National Life Stories [NLS] seeks to explore innovations in maritime safety through in-depth personal testimony. Using two long life story recordings, the grant will examine developments in the design and engineering of vessels and ports and the formulation of health and safety policy. The interviews will record specific changes, new technologies and approaches to risk management, documenting how institutional and policy change is instigated, introduced and evaluated. Interviews will be archived at the British Library in perpetuity and made available for research. 

West Sussex County Council: Cataloguing the Marine and General Mutual Life Assurance Society Archive

This project will see a qualified archivist to catalogue and repackage the Marine and General Mutual Life Assurance Society (MGM) Archive over eight weeks to make it accessible to researchers at West Sussex Record Office (WSRO). Founded in 1851, MGM provided life assurance to mariners. The collection consists of the company’s business records between 1852-2000s and includes material such as minutes, financial records, and policy registers. 

Lancashire Archive & Local History, Lancashire County Council: Fleetwood’s Coastal Past

The grant will promote Fleetwood's maritime heritage from the Lancashire Archives & Local History (LA&LH) collections through digitisation, public display at Fleetwood Library and digital records made available through our website Red Rose Collections and through our listening post at Lancashire Archives & Local History for researchers to consult.

Gloucestershire Archives: Gloucestershire Mariners

Gloucester developed as a seaport from 1827 when the ship canal opened to its new docks. Building on the historic trade of the River Severn an industry grew up, building, repairing, owning and crewing vessels in the ‘Home Trade’. South of Gloucester villages saw half their employment in maritime businesses.

This grant will study the industry, and the families involved to give an outline of Gloucestershire’s involvement in the national maritime industry. It will use national and local archives and research from dedicated family historians. 

National Historic Ships UK: Don’t Rock the Boat, Stability Guidance for Static Floating Heritage

This grant researched, developed and published accessible guidance material for the owners of static floating historic vessels, contractors and service providers to the industry. Previous work and stakeholder engagement had identified a lack of guidelines and stability criteria for static vessels and similar floating structures which are open to the public. This issue is a key concern for historic vessels when they cease seagoing activity but remain afloat, with the need to create a safe environment for their users and retain significance.

The guidance material is now available on the National Historic Ships UK website: Stability Guidance for Floating Static Vessels. For additional information about the project see this webpage.

The University of Portsmouth: Re-IMAGEnging Port Cities, Diversifying Portsmouth Maritime History by Co-designing Interactions  

 
Port cities' heritage portrays a problematic vision of colonial past that implicitly alienates communities who are underrepresented within maritime collections. This grant will co-design an interactive storytelling intervention using Portsmouth City Council Museum’s collection to facilitate the discovery of hidden histories and reflect on communal diversity, past, present and future.

The project will evaluate audience engagement and the educational opportunities of creative technologies to facilitate discourses around diversifying maritime heritage. This approach advocates for a proactive democratisation and reinterpretation of collections, challenging misrepresentation, thus creating social impact and engaging diverse audiences at the heart of communities. 

Maritime Archaeology Sea Trust: Royal Navy Loss List, Interlinking with NMRN and MoD Salmo

The grant will link the following three databases:

• The Royal Navy Loss List (RNLL) is a fully searchable research tool that covers all Royal Navy vessels recorded as sunk or destroyed from 1343 to 2011.
• The National Museum of the Royal Navy (NMRN) Finds Catalogue. This comprises its entire collection, detailing the artefacts and documents in its possession.
• MoD Salmo database of Legacy Merchant Ships employed by MoD at the time of sinking (many are PPWs).   

Highland Archive Service, High Life Highland: Following the Fish, Stories of the Herring Girls

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries hundreds of women left the Western Isles to travel north to Caithness then down the Scottish coast into England following the herring fleets. ‘Following the Fish’ seeks to research and tell the story of these women, their backbreaking work, and their vital importance to our national maritime history. Both individual stories and general context will be researched through collections held by the Highland Archive Service, Suffolk Archives, Norfolk Archives and Tasglann nan Eilean, resulting in the creation of an online exhibition, two sets of touring banners and two launch events (in Scotland and England).

SS Great Britain: Assembling the Great Western

Between 2024-29 the SS Great Britain Trust (SSGBT) is engaged in an ambitious project to recreate the earlier sister vessel of the Great Britain, the Great Western, in one half of Bristol’s last working drydock. The Great Western was the first purpose-built ocean-going steam vessel, and its successful launch and career marked a turning point in maritime history.  
   
A significant initial phase for the SSGBT in this engineering project is to initiate significant collections activity that will allow the museum to curate, explore, and publicly engage with the fascinating stories of the people of the Great Western 

Maritime Archaeological Society of Finland: Identifying Potential Shipwrecks on the Gulf of Finland.

Maritime Archaeological Society of Finland (MAS) is executing a long-term shipwreck surveying program "Baltic 3D Wreck Ontology", which aims at surveying all historic shipwrecks in the Baltic Sea and producing a virtual 3D-model and a scientific dating of the shipwrecks. This program has been active since 2018 and has already produced more than 150 surveyed sites and 3D-models/datings thereto.  
This grant will enable an additional 10-15 wreck sites to be surveyed, 3D-modeled, radiocarbon dated and reported to the Finnish Heritage Agency.

Swansea University: A Voyage of Discovery on the Avon Searider

For the UK to nurture new manufacturing industries that triumph in a globalised economy, lessons must be learned from companies that have achieved that, companies like Avon Inflatables, who engineered a safer world. Avon become synonymous with the best that inflatable boating could offer and launched the world's first commercial RIB, the Searider, in 1969. Designed as a rescue vessel, their pedigree and heritage is legendary, but how they came to dominate their market remains unexamined. Employing a case-study approach, the grant will enable qualitative interviews and documentary film to investigate the people, processes, technology, and timings to understand the Searider's success.