Blog

Posted on by Fay Curtis.

Penelope Chetwode and ‘the perfect ADC’ (personal assistant)

by Pat Ellingham, Archives volunteer Our volunteer, Pat Ellingham, found this story of the young Penelope Chetwode (later Lady Betjeman) in the photograph albums of Geoffrey Kellie, part of the British Empire & Commonwealth Collection. There’s a defin…

Posted on by Fay Curtis.

Unlocking Our Sound Heritage: Evacuees in St Levan

by Cara Powell, Unlocking Our Sound Heritage volunteer Cara Powell is completing her BA in History at the University of the West of England. The Unlocking Our Sound Heritage team were lucky enough to have her as a volunteer in 2019-20. Cara worked on a nu…

Posted on by Fay Curtis.

Birds and words: How to make an origami crane

by Ailsa Richardson, engagement officer for older people Although we are unable to run Creative Cafés at the museum right now, we have sent out some birds and words for participants to hang in their windows. These are individual gifts for residents l…

Posted on by Fay Curtis.

Dying Matters: A grief trail

by Lisa Graves, curator of world cultures This week is Dying Matters awareness week – a national campaign to encourage people to talk about death, dying or grief. Everything has changed. Our daily lives are transformed, possibly forever. We are al…

Posted on by Fay Curtis.

Listen to 40 years of art & artists from the Arnolfini archive

by David, Sam and Philippa, from the Unlocking Our Sound Heritage project The first collection held by Bristol Archives that Unlocking Our Sound Heritage (UOSH) digitised was from Arnolfini, Bristol’s contemporary arts centre. 40 years of artists’ ta…

Posted on by Fay Curtis.

Bristol’s VE Day celebrations brought to life

On Friday 8 May, we mark the 75th anniversary of VE Day – the end of the Second World War in Europe. On Tuesday 8 May 1945, celebrations took place across the country and Bristol was no exception. Two different audio-visual archives from Brist…

Posted on by Fay Curtis.

Archives advice: Preserving audio from a CD

by Samuel Bates, Audio Digitisation Engineer Sometimes, the problem you expect is not the problem you end up with. On the Unlocking Our Sound Heritage project, we are preserving thousands of at-risk audio items. We have cassettes and open-reel tapes,…

Posted on by Fay Curtis.

A dose of culture from home

As you may know by now, we have closed all of our museums to help prevent the spread of COVID-19. In the meantime, we are doing all we can to make Bristol’s museum collections available online for our audiences at home and around the world. We’ll b…

Posted on by Fay Curtis.

The effect of Coronavirus on Bristol

by Amber Druce – Curator of History Are you keeping a journal? One day, insights into this time during the Coronavirus pandemic will be really useful to historians so we’d love to hear from you if you can help. Our top tip for writing a journa…