A fantastic celebratory launch event, 25th Jan at Wolverhampton Art Gallery

The opening of the Apna Heritage Archive launch event on 25th January 2018 at Wolverhampton Art Gallery was a moment for me personally to savour and I believe will Iive long in the memory. So pleased that so many Punjabis which comprised of many of the participants and volunteers turned out to celebrate the launch of this inaugural archive in the City's main art gallery of Wolverhampton. It was cold outside but blazing hot inside with excitement, joy and gratitude from Punjabis from all backgrounds faiths and ages! There were so many others from arts based institutions up and down the country as well as regionally that came out to support. It was a rollercoaster ride setting this up in December but very thankful to the technicians  at Wolverhampton Art Gallery and Exhibitions Manger Tess Radcliffe of making sure it was alright on the night and it was! We had 5 speakers from our partners including the Heritage Lottery Fund and a very articulated speech about the archive and exhibitions importance from our main speaker and confidant the brilliant Bobby Tiwana! Thankful to all who helped make this a night to remember! - Anand Chhabra

Launch Event at Wolverhampton Art Gallery was packed out as community came to celebrate

Wolverhampton Magazine, double page feature in March 2018 edition/ Exhibition Launch Event

The Apna Heritage Archive exhibition opens at Wolverhampton Art Gallery

The Apna Heritage Archive Exhibition opened on the 13th January 2018 and extended until 18th March 2018. The award winning archive archive is a new resource led by Black Country Visual Arts. The project has developed a photographic archive of 2000 historic images of Punjabi migration to Wolverhampton covering three decades from 1960 to 1989. New portraits taken provide a present day record. Documents and other materials collated provide a context to this unique social history.  

You are invited to visit the gallery to see part of this amazing collection that documents the Punjabi communities life in Wolverhampton over 3 decades. From arrival in the 60's to weddings, births, working and social life!

The exhibition is on from 13th January to 7th March 2018 at Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Lichfield Street W-ton, see www.wolverhamptonart.org.uk for further information and opening times.

Back in the ARA magazine December 2017.

One of the highlights of 2017 was the award we received for the Best New Archive 2017 at the Community Archives and Heritage Awards (CAHG Awards) at University of Central London. The work we did was highlighted by the Chair of CAHG Sue Hampson in the December issue of the ARA (Archives Records Association) magazine. She wrote across three pages about the impact of the dedicated archive space in the most densely populated area for Punjabis in Wolverhampton! Thanks Sue! - Anand Chhabra

Apna Heritage Archive appears in the December 2017 issue of the ARA Magazine

Passing on learning about archiving to volunteers

The fantastic senior archivist at Dudley Archives Richard Lewis taught some of our volunteers the value of archiving at the end of November. Richard showed us how documents, photographs should be handled and ephemera looked after and kept, what temperature they should be kept at and how to display our items and keep them from damage. These along with the many legalities around copyright and community archives were a few of the wonderful ways in which we learned so much from this experienced professional. Everyone left enthused about archiving and keeping a record of history!  It was a great day at our dedicated archive space at the Guru Tegh Bahdur Gurdwara. We are very fortunate to have this space  archive space in the most densely populated area for Punjabis in the City of Wolverhampton. Thank you Richard Lewis! - Anand Chhabra

Our volunteers at Apna Heritage receive teaching on archiving by Richard Lewis

Richard Lewis in full swing teaching volunteers about how to secure photos and ephemera for the future.

Staff and volunteers engage with Richard about archiving information and ask questions.

We reached our target of 2000 archived images.........Phew!

The photograph pictured here is our 2000th image and represents us achieving our target for the Apna Heritage Archive. We are still continuing to collect images. This has been a real effort nothing short of blood sweat and tears, it's not been easy at making sure that we met this target especially thinking 6 months ago we reached our 1000th archived image. Special thanks to all families and individuals who have seen the value allowing us to scan their personal photographs and keep their history documented for future generations....hats off to them! Special thanks to all individuals who contributed in the last 2 years. Couldn't have done this without a real community effort. For us its been a privilege making new friends along the way! - Anand Chhabra

Faqir Singh leaves home for the ceremony of his wedding, Dartmouth Street, West Bromwich, 1965.

Wolverhampton History Fair 2017.

Regardless of what you may think this is not a scene from this years Emmy award winning series 'The Handmaids Tale',  no its from the other award winning series... that would be the Apna Heritage Archive! These ladies are actually dressed like this representing National Trust and in particular Moseley Old Hall in Wolverhampton (a lot of drama went on their with King Charles II hiding from Cromwell back in the day!) They were very enthusiastic about the images and articles on our stall along with other members of the public and we had a long day talking to a number of peeps about what we have done/doing with our archive collection. Special thanks to Wolverhampton City Archives for inviting us to be present again this year! - Anand Chhabra

National Trust staff look at at our work online and articles written about the Apna Heritage Archive.

Visit to the Royals Collections Trust

October was quite a busy month for BCVA! Anand Chhabra Chair of BCVA was invited to the Royal Collections Trust at Windsor Castle in October by the Photo Collections Network. It was an amazing treasure trove of photographs held by the Trust as anyone can imagine. There were not only photographs from the royal family of 100+years ago but also collections from the founders of photography as well as world famous photographers like Annie Leibovitz, Cecil Beaton and Mario Testino to name a few! This is where the real crown jewels are kept! Hope to see our collection there one day you never know. Unfortunately but understandably the only image we were allowed to take was this one taken from my phone!

A visit on invitation to the Royals Collection Trust October 2017

St Luke's Primary School Archive & Photography Workshops

We will be sorry to see the end of our workshops at St Luke's school here in Wolverhampton as part of the Apna Heritage Archive. The photos here document our work with the school in our final series of workshops just in the last two weeks. We have been doing about 5 sessions of workshops with at least 3 year groups over 2 years. It was important to have an educational element to our archive and grateful to St Luke's primary school for their partnership as up to 50% of pupils have Punjabi heritage. The pupils have been empowered by the importance of archiving a collection for future generations and learnt photographic skills. They have also uncovered their own archive kept hidden away at the school for more than a 100 years and thanks to HLF funding will receive display cabinets to put the found photographs, albums and ephemera. Special thanks to all pupils and staff at St Luke's Primary school extremely well done! Thanks also to our brilliant host Jon Everall at City Archives for hosting the tours around Molineux House and their strong rooms at City Archives. Not only that but allowing us to conduct our photographic workshops there. Its been a rewarding partnership for all!

St Luke's YR5 pupils have their photo taken for the school archive during 'Heritage Day' workshop. Pictured Emmanuela Chukwuku

Portraits taken for the school archive during 'Heritage Day' workshop. Picture Shyla and Shaheed

YR5 pupils discover artefacts about Wolverhampton history at City Archives visit.

Pupils learn to photograph details of the building for storytelling through images.

Pupils learn how photographic glass plates (over 100 years old!) are being photographed and digitised for an archive.

Jon Everall senior conservationist at City Archives takes pupils on a tour of the Strongrooms.

Exploring St Luke's school archive, workbooks created by pupils from the 1920s.

Pupils present to each other and talk about their heritage before archiving their photo.

PhotoCafe presentation

It was great evening at PhotoCafe in Birmingham on 27th September. It was a very interactive presentation with many good questions being asked about the archive and also with 2 new volunteers being signed up! We are grateful for PhotoCafe and Nicola Shipley from GRAIN for the invitation and 1000 Trades pub for hosting this event. For more information at where we will be speaking please do follow our @apna_heritage handle via twitter.

Anand Chhabra  presents the Apna Heritage Archive collection at PhotoCafe, Birmingham September 2017.

Invitation to speak at the PhotoCafe event in September 2017

Good things continue to happen and Anand will be speaking about the photography collection  'Apna Heritage Archive'  and particularly ways in which photographers as artists need to agglomerate with those in the locality to give their project the best chance of getting off the ground! Doors open at 6p.m. at 1000 trades pub in Jewellery Quarter. 

Our archive a 4 page feature in the August issue of Wolverhampton Magazine

We were interviewed earlier this month at our archive space by the lovely Heather Loat the chief editor at Wolverhampton Magazine. Our 4 page feature in this August issue describes not only how our archive started and the national award we recieved earlier this month but recognises the importance of the history of Punjabi migrants to Wolverhampton and the various impacts that they have had in the Black Country c1960s to 80s. Its great to see some of the hidden truths/stories presented here about this community via the article and through the imagery we have collected. At Black Country Visual Arts we are excited by the prospect of getting the news about the archive to the wider community of Wolverhampton especially as the region has been celebrating Black Country day on July 14th. We are delighted that August issue of the magazine itself is full of arts and culture which is great to see with the inception of the 'Wolves in Wolves' statues which is having a great buzz around town. A very thankful team here at BCVA for highlighting the Apna heritage Archive. Well done to Wolverhampton magazine for a very cultural issue of the magazine! The August issue of W-ton Mag is available to buy from local outlets now!

Apna Heritage Archive wins national award.

The Community Archives and Heritage Group (CAHG) held its annual conference at University College, London on 11 July 2017. Black Country Visual Arts cic won the ' The Best New Group' for the Apna Heritage Archive. The judges commented: “The Apna Heritage Archive run by Black Country Visual Arts (BCVA) is an outstanding example of collaboration capturing vitally important local heritage, in this case photographs and memorabilia on the migration of South Asian Punjabis to Wolverhampton from the 1960s to 1980s. The project has a strong educational element, including local schools (and the teaching of photography) and Wolverhampton University. We noted the involvement of a Gurdwara, the city council and others, as well as the supportive role of the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF). It is great to see HLF becoming more involved in community archives, and we hope that this presages a more strategic approach to the sector.”

"BCVA are delighted to receive this recognition from colleagues in the archives and records sector. It is testament to the energy and commitment of everyone involved in the Apna Heritage Archive: members of the local community, our local partners and, of course, the support and help provided by the Heritage Lottery Fund."

The Community Archives and Heritage Group (CAHG) Awards are organised, judged and presented by the Community Archives and Heritage Group, a special interest section of the Archives and Records Association (UK & Ireland), the main professional body representing archivists, records managers and archive conservators in Britain and Ireland. For more on the ARA, see www.archives.org.uk

Black Country Visual Arts wins national award for ‘The Best New Archive Group’ 2017

Apna Heritage Archive reaches a milestone with 1000th archived image.

We have reached a milestone with our 1000th image archived on our digital database! Archiving is no small feat as it requires a lot of attention to detail in obtaining information from participants who allow us to scan their pictures. Our 1000th image pictured here is from our volunteer Salgram Dass, a powerful portrait of family of his father and mother Sarwan and Amro Dass and their first child sister Kanta. The image below tells a forgotten story of where many Punjabi migrants came to live in Wolverhampton from 1960s onwards. This photo was taken on Inkerman St, in the Heath Town area. The area is still synonymous for where new migrants live today. So we're glad we achieved a milestone, only 1000 more images to go! Phew!?

Amro Dass, Kanta Dass and Sarwan Dass on Inkerman Street, Heath Town, Wolverhampton 1961

St Chad's Asian Ladies Group

We were delighted to host the St Chad's Asian Women's group at the Apna Heritage Archive. We taxied them in from their community centre and response was good with a small number from around 20 ladies bringing images with them. We were delighted as they brought fantastic images from 1960s-80s perfect for the archive! There was a lot of positive comments as now that most had seen the archive for themselves were better to understand what we at Black Country Visual Arts CIC wanted to achieve for our archive funded by Heritage Lottery Fund. Further to this we had received an invite to go back to the group and talk with the ladies individually to gather even more photos! Special thanks to Mrs Suraksha Asar and Mrs Kanchan Jain leaders of the group for helping arrange the visit to our archive space. 

St Chad's Asian Ladies group visit to the Apna Heritage Archive 

St Chad's Asian Ladies group learn to browse the archive physically and online.

The All Saints ladies group 'Mel Jool' visit the archive space.

We recently had a visit from the Mel Jool group from All Saints community centre. A majority of the group were away on their annual trips to India but we still had a strong interest and participation in our project. Mrs Bhatia had a carefully looked after archive of hundreds of images covering 3 decades from the Bilston area of Wolverhampton. She was keen to participate before also travelling to India! We also met Mrs Dhanjal a clay relief artist originally from India and now settled in Wolverhampton. Mrs Dhanjal has exhibited both here and abroad and is trully a very unique and talanted artirst.

Photograph of a clay relief by Mrs Ranjit Dhanjal taken on an archive home visit. 

Supriya and Mrs Dhanjal delve through the archived images online.

A photographic scoop for the Apna Heritage Archive!

We are proud to have a good number of images given to us by the generosity of Mr. Salgaram Dass for the Apna Heritage Archive. I met Mr Dass as he usually parks his car right outside my house to drop off of his children to a school here in Wolverhampton . As I get to know this very articulate and intelligent man he is instantly smitten with our work. Salgaram bought me negatives and then also learned skills and our protocols in scanning these amazing photos that depict the early years of life, living in Inkerman Street, Heath Town, Wolverhampton c 1960s. The vast majority of images here are taken by his father an ardent photographer. I restored and edited a few of these here and personally I find them nostalgic of a bygone age of innocence in the Black Country. Even more than that they are photographers dream and an amazing scoop for our archive in terms of telling the story of individuals and integration to life in Wolverhampton. There's more to come from this set of images we now have in our possession!

Mr Dass, his wife and his family with their first car c1961

Various Images around Inkerman st, Wolverhampton  c1964.

Portraits taken by Mr Dass around Inkerman St, Heath Town, Wolverhampton c1961

Photos of neighbours and friends around Inkerman St, Wolverhampton c1961.

Themes developing from Apna Heritage Archive

The Apna Heritage Archive is now starting to develop exciting themes through the collection of images. These will be an important part of our archive to reference images for research purposes and they also seemingly create a story of their own from within our collection circa 1960s-80s. In future we will be able to cross reference single word search items online, enjoy a couple of themes here ‘Bhaji on the Beach’ or ‘First Cars’. You can follow other themes available on a regular basis via our twitter handle @apna_heritage.

Working with two new community groups for Apna Heritage Archive

BCVA has started working with two new community groups from All Saints and Blakenhall on the Apna Heritage Archive project. We took along some of our archive prints to showcase the collection so far and introduced the project to the ladies. A keen interest was shown by both groups and we look forward to further visits and hopefully more photographs for the archive!

Ladies from the All saints group recognized people in the prints.

Humjoli Ladies Group visit Apna Heritage Achive

It was great to see the Humjoli Ladies Group visit the archive space at Guru Teg Bahadur Gurdwara in Blakenhall. They were really exited to see  prints of some of the archived material and the display of items collected from participants. This was a great opportunity to see some of their own photographs and some of the group had even brought along more photographs to archive for the project. The collection of prints started to bring back memories and stories from the 60's and 70's and early migration to Wolverhampton.

The ladies were great with the touchscreen computer!

New photos to archive.......

Talking about the good old days!

Bilston's Ek Onkar and Ekta Sangat ladies group participate in Apna Heritage Archive

It as been a pleasure working with new participants at Bilston Community Centre for the Apna Heritage Archive. The ladies have been digging out their old images for the archive, even storm Doris couldn't keep them away from their regular meeting last week. You can see above a group portrait we took after one of the yoga sessions. We look forward the meeting them soon and discovering more new archive material.