Early January 2025, I hit icy air getting off a U2 bus in Bristol, and make my way to the Theatre Collection for the first time. Though I’ve walked past this place countless times over various life stages and personal eras, this is my first visit – enabled by our Brigstow Institute funding for our project ‘Whispers in the Archive’. While I’ve been in archives before, I’ve never worked in one, and I’m excited.
It’s a fresh open space with long trestle tables. I am met there by members of the project team. Julian Warren, who runs the archive welcomes me, and we are joined by Barbara Caddick, a health researcher and historian who is used to working with archival materials. On the tables lie carefully chosen documents for us to explore. We start with newspaper articles, “useful to give a general view” our guide tells us. If we work round the table anticlockwise, dipping into various piles — one of Welfare State International’s work with a doctor’s surgery, another of a project in Gateshead — we’ll get a sense of what resonates with our own project. Welfare State International was a pioneering community arts company (1968-2006) whose participatory, socially engaged work often explored health and wellbeing themes, making their archives particularly valuable for our research.
After half an hour, I’m still reading the first newspaper article, and I realize I’m not going to cover much ground in one visit, not in any detail at least. The piles are like goodies, or archaeological finds, already discovered, but ready to have their stories read, and told. It becomes clear early on that how I view a document will be very different from how Barbara sees it. Where I might get caught up in the creative possibilities of a community theatre project, Barbara spots the historical patterns, the social context that shaped the work. These different perspectives spark rich conversations — which I think are going to be an extremely valuable part of our archive visits.
The archive comes with its own rituals and responsibilities. Keep the papers in order, only use pencils, no drinks or food… How easily these items could be damaged. We need to be careful with making public reference to the material too — some people mentioned are still alive, still working. I find photographs from forty years ago and I can just about make out faces of people I met fifteen years ago as much older people. We need to record any photos that we’ve taken, and we can’t publish any images without permission.
The physical experience of the archive keeps surprising me. There are reports decorated with intricate figures, programmes written by hand with removable song sheets for audience participation — friendly and invitational in a way that feels worlds apart from today’s slick digital designs. Everything is infused with creativity, not just from the Welfare State International team, but from the communities who were part of these projects.
After several visits, I can say I’ve definitely got the archive bug. I understand now why this work matters, why archives aren’t just storage rooms but living connections to the past. It’s like holding hands with thoughtful, idealistic, grounded and practical people across time. Looking at what they looked at, what they chose to keep, create, how they recorded it and reflected on it. It’s surprisingly intimate. At home I have diaries and letters from relatives that I treasure, but here I’m forming unexpected connections with strangers through their handwritten notes and messy scribbles (I especially asked the archivists for any hand-written items).
As Barbara has helped me see, there’s no single “right way” to do this work. It’s about feeling into it, letting yourself be surprised by what emerges. Sometimes the most valuable discoveries come not from what we’re looking for, but from what we didn’t expect to find.
About Welfare State International: Welfare State International created participatory events, ceremonies and celebrations with communities across the UK and internationally. Their work combined visual spectacle, music, and grassroots engagement, often addressing social and political issues through creative expression. Their archives contain valuable documentation of how they worked with health-related themes and community wellbeing, which connects directly to our project’s focus on chronic illness and creative community responses.