The South West sounds great!

Bristol Archives has been awarded over £1m from The National Lottery Heritage Fund for a new project to digitise and preserve over 8,000 unique, rare and at-risk audio recordings from across the region.   

Over the next three years the Sounds of the South West project will create access to at-risk audio recordings held in 24 different heritage organisations around the region, creating new opportunities for local communities to engage with their area’s past.  

Bristol Archives, part of the Bristol Culture service in Bristol City Council, will lead the project in partnership with Archives South West, the regional network of local authority archives. 

Philip Walker, Head of Culture and Creative Industries at Bristol City Council, said: "We’re thrilled that The National Lottery Heritage Fund has chosen to support Sounds of the South West. Preserving audio heritage creates a brilliant opportunity for our communities to engage with their own social history.  

"We are grateful to all National Lottery players, as the funding for this project means we can safeguard voices from the past and make them accessible for future generations, ensuring these stories and sounds are never lost."

Audio heritage is at risk; there are fewer than 10 years left to preserve heritage audio recordings due to decaying old formats, such as reel-to-reel tapes, and correct playback equipment becoming either obsolete or problematic to maintain.  

Bristol Archives Sound Room has the specialist equipment needed to digitise most audio formats produced in the last 100 years. With this funding, the Sound Room will be a regional resource in audio digitisation for the duration of the project and into the future. Once the recordings are in digital form, the project plans to share them as widely as possible 

Katie Scaife, Project Manager of Sounds of the South West, Bristol Archives said: "Thanks to this incredible funding we can work in partnership with the regions’ archives to collectively address this urgent need, a need that we can’t tackle alone.  

"The Sounds of the South West project will include ways for communities around the region to engage with their audio heritage, such as volunteering opportunities and community engagement activities. We’re so excited to share this project with everybody, not just in the region but around the world."

Stuart McLeod, Director of England - London & South at The National Lottery Heritage Fund, said: “We’re delighted to support Bristol Archives in safeguarding the South West’s rich and diverse heritage. From music to dialects, thanks to National Lottery players, thousands of rare and at-risk recordings will now be preserved for future generations. Sounds of the South West will not only protect these important collections but also provide new opportunities for people to connect with the voices, memories and stories that have shaped our communities over the centuries.” 

The project will focus on collections most urgently needing preservation against permanent loss including oral histories illustrating social change, disappearing dialects and accents, evidence of environmental change and unique music and drama performances, as well as threatened languages such as Cornish.  

Find out more about the project by contacting the Bristol Archives at archives@bristol.gov.uk.