St Helens Borough residents are being asked to record their experience of life in lockdown to share with future generations.
The St Helens Archive Service have launched an appeal for residents to help document how life across the borough has been affected due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Your contribution to the archive will be catalogued and preserved alongside St Helens Archive Service’s other unique collections.
Councillor Anthony Burns, Cabinet Member for Public Health, Leisure, Libraries, Arts and Heritage, said:
“We are living through an extraordinary period in history and every member of our community has been affected by coronavirus in some way.
“It’s our job to tell the story of the borough and its people. Our history is a shared one, and we’re asking you to take part.
“We’d like to encourage you, the people of St Helens Borough, to record your experiences of coronavirus, which we can then preserve in the archives so that future generations can understand what we are living through; the magnificent local response from our frontline key workers; the amazing volunteers who helped the most vulnerable in our communities – and how we overcame it, together.
There are lots of ways residents can contribute to the project, either by keeping a diary, creating a scrapbook, taking photographs or videos, writing songs, poems, drawing, collecting leaflets and more. The collected items will help to document this unique period in our lives for future generations to discover. The lockdown project collection aims to show many different people’s perspectives of the pandemic whilst living through this unique period of time.
Items that are chosen for preservation will be catalogued and stored as part of borough archive collections and possibly shared in future exhibitions.
For more information about how you can get involved and contribute to the project, please visit www.sthelens.gov.uk/libraries/archive-service or call 01744 671748.
Contributions can be submitted by email to archives@sthelens.gov.uk or delivered in person once it is announced it is safe to do so.
