Awarded Heritage Centre small grants - June 2025

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki – Special Account for Research Funds: Database of Lloyd’s Registered Ship Losses in the Greek Sea 

This project aims to develop the first open access database of the 20th century shipwrecks in the Greek seas, linking them with Lloyd’s Register online records.

Despite Greece’s rich maritime history, there is no centralized digital dataset of shipwrecks spanning the past century. Instead, available information is fragmented, existing in analog form or across disparate sources, restricting accessibility and research potential. 

Lloyd’s Register Foundation’s records provide valuable maritime data, yet no structured linkage currently exists between these records and Greek shipwreck incidents.

This project will address these challenges by digitizing and integrating shipwreck data into structured, accessible, and interconnected datasets, establishing direct linkages with Lloyd’s Register Foundation. 

GIRT Scientific Divers Pty Ltd: Working with community to document Potentially Polluting Wreck 

Collaborating with the National Museum of the Philippines and the University of the Philippines Diliman, GIRT will lead a team to engage with a local dive shop in Subic Bay to condition monitor the El Capitan wreck and to establish an ongoing monitoring regime targeted at oil release and structural site collapse. 

Activities include: teaching the GIRT Scientific Diving citizen science methodology; monitoring the El Capitan site to form a baseline understanding of the wreck's condition; sharing the GIRT survey report to facilitate monitoring of identified areas of concern; and modifying the GIRT website and workflow to enable easy ongoing reporting of surface observations of oil spillage. 

The project will investigate information in the Lloyd’s Register Foundation's archives and others to understand the construction of the vessel and general arrangements of the El Capitan. Archival information collected will be overlaid on photogrammetry of the site, which the research team will aim to collect, and any publicly available multi-beam/lidar survey date of the local seafloor.  

Maritime Archaeology Trust: Anderson’s Bristol Fleet: Transatlantic ships trading in enslaved people

The project will undertake historical research into the 21 ships owned by John Anderson operating out of Bristol between 1760 and 1797.

The research on Andersons fleet will use a proven combination of resources. The Lloyd’s Register (LR) of Shipping will act as a basis for research, followed by a combination of the use of online, national and local archive sources including the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, Richardson’s publications, British Newspaper Archive online, Bristol City Archive, Bristol Reference library and The National Archive. Gathered data will enable the full ship biography for each of the Anderson's ships to be developed to explore, build, repair or rebuild, commercial use-life, details of loss and potential to add to the ship biography from other international archives. The collective analysis of Anderson’s fleet will reveal details of international connections, ports and shipping conditions, factors involved in loss, and further illuminate the British role within the transatlantic slavery system in the later 18th century. 

Maritime Museum Rotterdam: Dutch maritime women, a historical study

Thanks to the research conducted by the Maritime Museum for their exhibition ‘maritime women’ in 2024, they identified over 200 maritime women within the Museum’s collection with their stories remaining unknown. This grant will conduct future research on maritime women within their collection. This research will then feed into a research hub to consolidate new knowledge. This will act as a pilot to further address, cherish and expand the museum as a centre for research by investigating how to create a place where national and international researchers, museums and (maritime) institutions and companies can share their knowledge, initiatives, exhibitions and publications. 

The Society for the Documentation of Submerged Sites: MAMER: Mediterranean PPWs Initiative: Mapping, Assessing, and Monitoring Environmental Risks

The MAMER project provides a strategic framework for assessing PPW risks in the Mediterranean. Our approach focuses on collaborative protocol development, data integration, targeted analysis, and standard dissemination.

The project will develop an open-access GIS platform to standardise and integrate our extensive collection of Mediterranean PPW data gathered by the SDSS over the past two decades.  This platform will consolidate historical information, ship construction details, and comprehensive underwater survey results, creating a significantly more comprehensive and accessible resource for PPW management. 

It will then test the collaboratively developed protocols on four strategically selected WWII shipwrecks—two in the Strait of Messina and two in Bonifacio, including oil tankers at each location. This pilot will involve detailed assessments using advanced imaging techniques (photogrammetry, video, photographs), comprehensive environmental sampling of biota and sediments, and safety protocol testing with DAN Europe, ensuring safe diving practices around PPWs. 

Analysis in the laboratory will evaluate the presence of pollutants and their bioaccumulation, demonstrating the effectiveness of our risk assessment methods. 

Findings will be disseminated through comprehensive reports, workshops, and open-access publications, establishing a standardised methodology for assessing the risks presented by PPWs in the Mediterranean.  

National Maritime Museum Amsterdam: Kru Berbicara. Indonesian crew members on Holland-America Line ships, 1971-1989

The project will collect and preserve first-hand oral histories from Indonesian crew members who served aboard Holland-America Line cruise ships between 1971 and 1989. 

In collaboration with 'Holland-America Line Indonesia' (HALIndo), an alumni network of former Holland-America Line employees, the oral histories will be conducted with 25 former seafarers in Bandung, Bogor, and Jakarta.  This includes lower-ranking crew members, strikers and protesters, more LGBTQ+ individuals, and people from less-represented ethnic backgrounds, particularly from East Java and Bali. 

The resulting oral history archive will inform future exhibitions, public programming, and research, restoring long-silenced voices to the historical record and deepening public understanding of post-colonial maritime labour and queer life at sea. 

Memorial University of Newfoundland: SWAAN: Seafaring Women Aboard and Ashore Network 

This project will focus on creating a community concerned with researching women and seafaring and connected to bodies seeking to resolve gender disparities in the modern maritime workforce, as well as stable and accessible resources regarding this history and modern recruitment strategies. 

It will convene a workshop hosted in-person at MUN will bring scholars into the MHA, an underutilized resource for exploring the international history of maritime labour. Over the project’s duration, workshop participants will produce scholarship suitable for publication in academic or popular presses. 

A capstone conference, supported by a grant through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), will bring public and professional participants in for conversations about the current state of women’s maritime labour and to strategize about how to support recruitment efforts with greater awareness of women’s longstanding relationship to and place in seafaring.  

MaritimEA Research: Wrecks and Records: Building Pakistan's Maritime Past

Through this grant, MaritimEA will develop a database of wrecks in Pakistani waters based on several known colonial period records. 

These records include the Return of Wrecks and Casualties in Indian Waters, published annually from 1865 by the Registrar of Wrecks in India. Other potentially useful records include the Sindh and Bombay Gazettes, available from 1848 onwards. Specifically, the Shipping Arrivals and Departures Records and Notices to Mariners sections of the Gazettes will be assessed. 

Additional digitized archives in the UK, such as the Lloyd’s Register archives that include the Register of Ships, Ship Plans and Survey Reports Collections shall be assessed for vessels involved in casualty or wrecking events in Pakistani waters.  

MSDS Marine: Deep Sea Heritage at Risk

This grant will develop a user-friendly, publicly accessible digital mapping application that highlights the risks submerged heritage faces from Deep Sea Mining (DSM). This project aims to harness public interest in Under Water Cultural Heritage (UCH) to build broader support for stronger protections against DSM. 

By creating a platform that visualises the global scope of the problem and simplifies complex data, we can make these risks clear to both the public and key decision-makers. The platform will also include data on intangible heritage in impacted regions, translating cultural practices and traditional knowledge into easily accessible resources and case studies. 

This offers a more nuanced view of the heritage at risk, especially as such intangible assets are often overlooked in DSM discussions. By combining tangible and intangible data into a single, open-access tool, this project will provide a powerful resource for advocacy, education, and policy engagement. 

The Ocean Foundation: Open Access book on protecting Titanic and maritime safety heritage

This project will produce an open access book to raise awareness of the challenges overcome following the discovery of the Titanic wreck, as well as the impacts of the disaster on maritime safety and conservation of our shared cultural heritage.

It will tell the story behind the 1986 US Act to protect Titanic, the negotiation of the International Agreement with the UK, Canada and France which took until 2000 to complete. The book will summarize this Titanic legal battle that was complicated but resulted in new maritime law incorporating international and US historic preservation law and policy to serve the public interest in this ocean heritage. 

University of Portsmouth: Wrecknet: Connecting south coast shipwreck collection stories by co-creative networking

The AHRC Unpath’d Waters (2021-24) project identified that shipwreck collections and archives are separated, with few national digital connections and many constraints, like paywalls and travel, for public and researchers to access them and their catalogues and few collection artefacts are digitised. Therefore, there are oncomplete or deficient connections between the different types of shipwreck institutions, collections, and archives.

The creation of the Wrecknet team will ratify that by confirming contacts, carrying out surveys, undertaking conversations and organising face-to-face interactions. Wrecknet would enable broad networking around shipwreck connections and link the west-south-coast and east-south-coast by enriching rather than replicating opportunities.