Folio Consulting

Routes to Roots: A South Asian Heritage Project

The Routes to Roots project is led by Maya Productions and works with South Asian communities in Bradford, Sheffield and Croydon. The project uses a multi-arts approach to capture, archive and preserve authentic stories that tell the stories of south Asian heritage, challenging unhelpful assumptions and stereotypes. 

Folio Consulting are providing advice and support to the project in relation to preserving the creative outputs of the project, liasing with archive services relating to new accessions of material, supporting exhibitions, and advising on the ongoing management of oral history recordings. 

'Archives in Action' at Scotney Castle

We were delighted to work in the beautiful surroundings of Scotney Castle, a National Trust property in Kent. Folio Consulting supported the staff and volunteers at Scotney on a voyage of discovery with their archive collections.

The archives were spread around the main house in chests, cabinets, drawers, cupboards and boxes. After an initial overview survey of the contents, we worked with a team of volunteers to repackage the archives into acid free, archivally friendly enclosures, and organise them into a more logical arrangement reflecting their provenance and original order.

This work was sometimes carried out in 'the archives house' - a space specifically made available to the project so that the public could see the volunteers in action working directly with the archive material. Later on the project continued in the attic spaces at Scotney Castle where the archives were temporarily housed before a planned transfer to more appropriate storage. The collection is due to be transferred to the Kent History and Library Centre in Maidstone where it will be made available to the public for research.

8 Places 800 Years: History of Place Project

We worked with Accentuate UK on their Heritage Lottery Funded 'History of Place' project exploring the history of deaf and disabled people through time.

In the development phase of the project, we helped History of Place to locate and understand more about the archive material available at eight sites of significance for the history of disability in the UK. These sites include the Guild of the Brave Poor Things in Bristol, the Royal School for the Blind in Liverpool, the Royal School for the Deaf in Margate, the Maison Dieu in Faversham, St Saviour's Church for the Deaf in Acton, and the Grove Road Housing Scheme in Sutton-in-Ashfield.

Later, we continued to work with the History of Place project to ensure the archive collections remained accessible, training volunteer researchers in archive techniques, carrying out oral history interviews, listing and cataloguing some of the archive material, and advising on exhibiting archive materials for exciting exhibitions in Bristol's M-Shed, the Museum of Liverpool, and the V&A. 

See https://historyof.place/ for further detail on the History of Place project. 

List of clients

Folio Consulting has been fortunate to have worked with several clients providing professional advice and support on archive and heritage matters.

Our clients have included: 

• Accentuate UK 
• Scotney Castle (National Trust) 
• Brighton & Hove Museums 
• Isle Heritage CIC
• Maya Productions
• Walking with Ghosts Project