The Cornish Bottle Archive

Aim

To create an online archive recording all Cornish known bottles dating up to 1939 for the local community and beyond to access online.

The Cornish Bottle Archive (founded in 2023) was established to document all known, found and collected Cornish bottles, to share with the community. 2026 marks 50 years since the last major bottle exhibition in Cornwall. 

This is part of our heritage and is currently under-represented and finds itself in museum storage areas and behind closed doors within private collections. Today the local community cannot access these objects and aspect of our heritage. Bottles tells stories of local families and business, while the objects themselves represent innovative design.

Since establishing this community led project we have received a huge amount of interest, engagement and support from the Cornish community, and we believe this project deserves to happen.  

'Sharing Cornwall's heritage through bottles'.

Our mission - Over the next 12 months we propose to...

• Visit museums and private collectors across Cornwall to professionally photograph the bottles
• Research the bottles and upload them onto the cornishbottlearchive.com website
• Deliver and curate a touring exhibition and series of talks allowing us to meet the community and offer an opportunity for people to bring in their bottles to be recorded
• Commission a locally illustrated map and 20 individual locality pages reaching across Cornwall.

We piloted an exhibition and created a page for the Redruth area in 2024 which received funding from FEAST and was hosted at Kresen Kernow. We now have a clear idea of how long this ambitious project will take and how best to photograph the bottles.

Funding method

Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made by 22nd July 2026 at 10:54pm