London Metropolitan Archives, in partnership with Archives for
London Ltd and the British Library, is participating in a project
funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, to celebrate sport in
archives. This project is part of LMA’s contribution to the
Cultural Olympiad being planned around the 2012 Olympic Games.
Winning Endeavours will digitise and share documents, newspaper
articles, visual material and ephemera relating to London’s Olympic
past, specifically the 1908 and 1948 Olympic Games which were
hosted in London, and London sportsmen and women who have
participated in Olympiads over the years.
The archive material will be taken from repositories throughout
London and the South East, and digital copies will be taken of all
selected items. These copies will be published on a new website
which will remain live until the end of 2012, when it will be
archived at the British Library. The stories behind the images will
be told in the website and the collection of images will be fully
searchable. The website will be useful for journalists, researchers
and anyone interested in London’s place in Olympic History.
Winning Endeavours aims to attract new audiences to archives,
especially children and young people, and a range of activities are
planned around the project to encourage interest in sport and in
the archives which can shed light on how sport was portrayed, and
played, in the past. Events will include guided walks around sites
within London and the South East which have strong Olympic links,
such as the Herne Hill velodrome and special family sessions based
around the history of sport, which will take place in local parks.
These events will take place during the summer and autumn of
2010.
The project’s dedicated researcher has spent the last six months
contacting and visiting potential contributors, including the
British Library Newspaper Library at Colindale and a variety of
local and specialist archive repositories. This phase of the
project will come to and end in early June 2010. She has identified
21 separate contributing repositories so far, including:
- University of East London who hold the remains of the British
Olympic Association archive
- Hammersmith & Fulham and Brent Local Archives, in whose
boroughs the 1908 and 1948 Olympic games were held
- University of Westminster
- The Historic Advertising Trust
- The Scouts Association