The council is applying for Lottery funding
News Adam Postans Local democracy reporter 05:00, 22 Apr 2025
Thousands of rare audio recordings that capture the social history of Bristol over the last century could be saved from destruction in a £1million project.
The clips, including recollections, oral histories, disappearing accents and language, and unique music and drama performances, are on obsolete formats, such as old reel-to-reel tapes, which are at risk of being lost forever because they are perishing and there is a lack of playback equipment.
The city council is now applying for Lottery funding to preserve and digitise 8,000 of these recordings at the greatest risk.
The project, called Sounds of the South West, is led by Bristol Archives which has the specialist equipment in its sound room to do this for most of the material held at 25 heritage sites and repositories across the region, on loan from the British Library for as long as it is needed.
A report to the council’s strategy and resources committee on Monday, April 14, said: “Digitising this material will make it accessible to listeners, often for the first time in decades.
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“Once the recordings are digitised, we plan to share as widely as possible.
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“The project will include a range of ways for communities around the region to engage with their audio heritage including volunteering opportunities and community engagement activities and projects.
“People around the region and around the world will be able to engage with the project online via the project’s social media channels and a project website.
“The project will focus on collections most urgently needing preservation against permanent loss and those that will resonate with local people including oral histories illustrating social change and disappearing dialects and accents, threatened languages (eg Cornish), evidence of environmental change, and unique music and drama performances.”
Last year, Sounds of the South West received £177,000 from the National Lottery Heritage Fund to develop the plans.
The additional £1million, if awarded, will be to deliver the project over the next three years.
This would still leave a £78,000 shortfall but independent charity Bristol Museums Development Trust has agreed to underwrite it while other funding sources are explored.
The report said: “Professional consensus internationally is that there are fewer than 10 years left to preserve at-risk audio archives due to the twin threats of format degradation and the rapid obsolescence of playback equipment.
“Securing this funding will be of enormous value; it will allow us to preserve very at-risk heritage, raise our regional profile, and lead to new opportunities for local communities to engage with their area’s past to help understand the present and future.”
Project manager Katie Scaife told the meeting: “The clock is really ticking on our ability to preserve as much as possible.
“The audio archives we’re preserving are rare, unique and very much at risk.
“They cover a really wide range of topics – they have unique performances of music and theatre, there is a lot of old history, they cover minority languages recordings, they give us an insight into a lost or disappearing ways of life, and they evidence as people talk about their life social and environmental change over the last 50 or 60 years up to more recent recordings.
“There are still at least 17,000 items of audio heritage in the South West alone that need to be preserved.”
She said that of the 8,000 recordings to be preserved initially, 3,000 were from Bristol.
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Ms Scaife added: “I’m a believer in learning about your past helps you understand the present and inform the future as well.”
