Ships In The Night explored the local heritage of the shipbuilding company Harland & Wolff and their time at the Royal Docks. By training a team of local people in archive research and oral history collection skills, we unearthed archival information about the company and collected new oral histories.
Twenty volunteers participated in our archive and oral history collection training with Eastside Community Heritage to collect ten oral histories from ex-dock workers through interview sessions, and wider community visits to the Royal Docks and Lyle Park.
Due to changes in the local landscape, it proved difficult to find people with a connection to Harland & Wolff, so one of the highlights was locating an apprentice from Harland & Wolff (in the Royal Docks) participate!
London Borough of Newham Archivist Jenny Munro-Collins, worked with the group exploring maps of the Royal Docks at different periods to identify the sites that Harland & Wolff occupied. The volunteer participants traversed the Royal Docks to decipher where the Harland & Wolff yards had been located. Armed with a map from 1963, a handful of photographs from the Eastside and LBN archives, and a crucially helpful oral history history collected from George Lowe, the group successfully identified the key sites in the archive photographs.
Artist Poppy Szaybo delivered a series of ten workshops with the following schools: Drew Primary, Vicarage Lane Primary, Brampton Primary, Shaftsbury, Kingsford Community School, Langdon, Elmhurst Primary, Eastlea, Lister Community School and Ellen Wilkinson. Through the development of key resources based on the archive research produced by the volunteers and contributions by Eastside Community Heritage, she encouraged the children to think about life in the Royal Docks at the time that Harland & Wolff were operational.
As part of the outcomes from this project, we created a learning resource tool kit suitable for Keystages 1 & 2, made available in digital format to download from our website .
The project was funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, and delivered in partnership with Eastside Community Heritage.
