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Aim: Ordinarchive, is a participatory ‘archive of the ordinary’ documenting and preserving everyday life in West Yorkshire.
We hold artworks, Film/photography, and oral history which is used as prompts for our community’s memories to champion under-represented stories.
Funding for stage one: to digitise more of our our collection before it is lost forever.
We hold 1000s of artworks, photographic negatives, 16mm film, 8mm film and Professional U-matic and Beta tapes as well as amateur photographs of Leeds, Bradford and West Yorkshire. BMT also represents the work of 2 of its directors:
Tony Pryce’s large scale paintings of the Northern Soul community
Garry Clarkson’s extensive archive of news and social history recorded during his career as a newspaper photographer for Leeds Other Paper/Northern Star, Independent and Guardian amongst others. The day to day life of working class people at work and leisure, many of whom have then become the ‘movers and shakers’ of business and culture in the area. There are three stages to Ordinarchive.
1. Records at Risk: digitising our archive for the preservation of this historically significant collection in immediate peril.
2. Innovation: archive available for researchers, as a documentation of life and the stories of people often overlooked. Concentrating on the former textile industry in Bradford and the underground Jazz music musicians and prompters in Leeds, using oral history alongside film and photos to show the transformative lives of residents.
3. Engagement: to connect archives with their communities and the wider public as a socially engaged web ‘hub’, and exhibition. This shared archive will provide material for a planned film about Leeds and West Yorkshire available to licence for broadcast and publishing.
This Records at Risk Grant 2025 is for the first stage of this project. We need to collate, digitise and archive this collection as a matter of urgency.
1. Using the services of Alive Studios in Devon, whose clients include BBC, Imperial War Museum as well as film production companies and editors, to digitise professionally.
Hardware to achieve archive ‘redundancy’ .
2. Engage a freelance manager/cataloguer and editor.
We have already digitised a few of these tapes through a grant from The National Archives but need to build on this and digitise the rest.
Funding method
Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made by 19th August 2025 at 5:05pm