Last week, we celebrated the Wimbledon College of Arts Archive and its new digital presence, with a community event. This was a collaborative effort across the UAL Archives and Special Collections Centre (ASCC) team and Wimbledon College of Archives, led by me from the ASCC and Jan Morgan, Special Collections Librarian at Wimbledon.
The event was well attended and included visitor from local community groups, Alumni, and the Merton Borough Heritage service, as well as staff, former staff and students. It was organised as part of a project to share our digital collections and was an experiment for us in different ways we might engage communities, both physically and digitally. We can take some of this learning forward for future projects.
Attendees met each other for tea and cake. We then shared a demonstration of the platform from the collection. Visitors could access the site via their own devices using QR codes to view the digital images, and then also had the opportunity to view some of the original physical archival material, in the Wimbledon Special Collections reading room.
Visitors were also invited to share their stories with us. They identified several people who we previously had not been able to, in the photographs. We were thrilled that our visitors included Alumni of the college. We hope to continue collecting stories to include in the archive in different ways.
The Archive Story
The archive was catalogued by archivist Adam Duncan in 2023. He diligently helped us to arrange and repackage the material including as much information as he was able to glean within the time of the cataloguing project in his descriptions. It is now available for access and research, physically, with the Special Collections service at Wimbledon library, and we can continue to enrich our knowledge and understanding of it.
The material selected for digitisation includes many photographs of former staff and students from the Wimbledon School of Arts (as it was then known) from the 1950s to the 1970s. They are shown at work in studios and outside around the campus, as well as in the local area, on a range of creative projects. show a wide range of pedagogy and practices developing in the 1960s and 1970s, reflecting innovations happening at many arts schools across London at that time.
There seems to have always been a costume design programme at Wimbledon. Wimbledon became part of UAL in 2006 and became known as Wimbledon College of Arts in 2013. In 2019, it opened Acting and Performance courses, and it has begun to focus its teaching, learning and research further on theatre arts and production, film and television. Another selection of images for digitisation focussed on the of former students. We hope that this selection will be of particular interest to our current students.
A number of theatre production photographs were found in the archive in a curious format, mounted on plywood board (which is not conservation-friendly), so digitisation is also important as a way of helping to preserve the images. We have yet to figure out exactly why they were mounted in this way. It might have been for a particular kind of display in connection with theatre productions. More research is needed!
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Two theatre design students working on set models in the 1960s. Wimbledon College of Arts Archive, ref WCA/1/2/1/4/70 -
Set design for a scene from The Importance of Being Earnest, designed by former student Liz Walker, 1966. Wimbledon College of Arts Archive, ref WCA/1/2/2/7/104 -
Scene from The Importance of Being Earnest, with set designed by former student Liz Walker, 1966. Wimbledon College of Arts Archive, ref WCA/1/2/2/7/102
Curated Collections
Back in spring we also ran a workshop for Wimbledon staff on using a particular feature of the Digital Collections platform, known as . Librarian at Wimbledon. This is a tool we can use going forward to highlight different aspects of the collection, and its links to other collections at the university.
This year I have been working to preserve and make these images accessible, as part of a short-term secondment role for Digital Preservation and Access. As well making them accessible on the Digital Collections platform, they are also ingested into our Digital Preservation system, Preservica. I will write more about processes involved in this work, in forthcoming Archive Stories.
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A group of students working on a life-size sculpture of a leopard with former sculpture tutor, James Turner in the background, 1970. Wimbledon College of Arts Archive, ref WCA/1/2/1/5/7 -
Sculpture tutor in workshop, 1970s, Wimbledon College of Arts Archive, ref WCA/1/2/1/5/101 -
Sculpture technician 'Terry' at Wimbledon College of Arts, with a sculptural assemblage in the 1960s, Wimbledon College of Arts Archives, ref WCA/1/2/1/4/63
Find out more
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By clicking on and following to 'more information’, you can discover where the item sits in the . Our guides are also useful when navigating the catalogue.
You can find out how to book an appointment to see the archive, at Wimbledon, here.
For any questions about Archives and Special Collections or our digital projects, please email archive-enquiries@arts.ac.uk