By KLTV Newsdesk
Kirklees Local TV is proud to have been announced as the winner of the ‘Gathering & Preserving Heritage’ award in the 2020 Community Archives and Heritage Group (CAHG) national awards, which took place via a virtual awards ceremony on Monday 26th October.
The Gathering & Preserving Heritage award focuses on the process of collecting heritage and preserving or stewarding heritage.
The national awards, which celebrate the importance of community archives and heritage, 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. 2020 marks the ninth year of the awards.
Kirklees Local TV (KLTV) has created an archive for, about and with people whose local histories were underrepresented in wider narratives about change over time.
KLTV decided to seek funds to capture one significant set of missing and disappearing voices from the existing official histories of Huddersfield – those of the Windrush Generation pioneers and their families.
The result was ‘Windrush the Years After: A Community Legacy on Film’, a community engagement and heritage project made in deep collaboration with Huddersfield’s African-Caribbean descent community, that celebrates, commemorates and motivates cross-generational and cross-community audiences.
The project undertook activities, developed skills and created lasting resources to educate, inspire and tell a national story from a local perspective – with the contributions made by invited African-Caribbean economic migrants and their descendants to local/regional life.
Milton Brown, Chief Executive Officer at Kirklees Local TV, said: “We are immensely proud of winning this award. I offer a special thank you to the community commentators and volunteers who took part in this project, KLTV staff, The National Heritage Lottery Fund, and in particular the University of Huddersfield.
“Their support from the start of the project until its new beginning has been invaluable.
“Looking back at history, and creating history at the same time, providing an opportunity for silent voices to be heard is something we pride ourselves on within KLTV.
“Our archiving enables future generations to explore and critically examine the experiences of African Caribbean descendants who came from to Britain during the late 1940s to the 1980s.
“As a resource, ‘Windrush: The Years After a Community Legacy on Film’ along with the archives, contributes significantly to Black British History.”
The archives are accessible at the University of Huddersfield archives and we hope the film can be shown in the summer of 2021.
For any further information regarding the Windrush The Years After project please contact Dr Heather Norris Nicholson.
Commenting on the winning project, the judges said: “We would like to congratulate everyone involved in the Kirklees Local TV archive project.
“We were very impressed by the archival work that was being done, particularly as this was not a typical archive project and instead was more concerned with media. The project was very topical in terms of the narratives that it explored.”
