The success of the Revealing Stories project resulted in encouragement from the Heritage Lottery Fund to bid for further funding for a new long-term project. We propose to create a project about place.
Place will be a series of explorations of LGBT lives, both historic and present. The project will seek to draw teams of people together to research and record histories of the diverse individuals and communities that make up Bristol’s LGBT life.
Radnor Hotel
Copyright: Anna Henderson
Places of significance may range from common places where people meet (now or in the past), the shifting map of the LGBT scene, sites of memory or life events significant to one individual or small groups, places of religious toleration, dissent and diversity, and sites relevant to public, political and civic oppression and acceptance.
The internet offers the most flexible and powerful way for us to deliver a new project. We envisage an interactive map-based system from which multi-media information would be accessible – including images, film, photographs and artworks inspired by place, sound clips from oral history recordings, music, text and digitised extracts from local press or publications.
The Bristol Archives website Know Your Place is well-established and provides a series of map bases from 1750 to the present to which community information is attached. We are already discussing with Bristol City Council how we can use Know Your Place as a platform on which to build our ‘layer’ of LGBT history data. This approach would extend our partnership with Bristol Museums Service and the Bristol Record Office. We will also aim to include links with educational/schools groups which was a notable success for Revealing Stories.
Everyone is welcome to get involved. We seek people to do research, conduct oral history interviews, produce video/audio, create artwork and construct the website. Get in touch via our contact form.
