Teesside Archives

The Teesside Archives are out and about this weekend, starting with the Armed Forces Day event in Stockton tomorrow! We'll be in one of the pagodas on Riverside Road close to the wonderful new park with war and Stockton related records, maps and images. Come down and share your stories with our team and chat with our conservator about the critical work she carries out to clean, repair and store our precious collections. Remember, we are your archive and these are your stories!

Thanks to Mr Bartley at St Joseph’s Primary School for inviting the archives back for the school’s history week, celebrating the amazing heritage of theMighty Boro. 160 children in 2 hours went time travelling with our maps, covering 200 years of innovation, grit, resilience, opportunity, migration, success and community spirit. Middlesbrough will be marking its bicentenary in 2030, let’s start celebrating its remarkable story now!

It was lovely to be invited to take part in a lunchtime careers fair at 6th form today, and great to meet students who’d already visited the archives earlier this year for an insight in to how an archive operates. With very real skill shortages in such areas as conservation, we need to inspire and encourage the next generation to consider these areas as real and achievable career choices.

This week is National Volunteer Week and we want to take this opportunity to extend the biggest thank you to our dedicated group of archive volunteers, past, present and future!
Volunteers help us in so many ways; they carry out visual research and box list and repackage new collections, they transcribe handwritten records and digitise material to make it more accessible, they support guided walks and community events that bring our stories to wider audiences and help us to ensure our collections reflect the communities which we serve. We simply couldn't do what we do without them so thank you and here's to another year of storytelling and discovery!

We have had some wonderful records deposited at the archives recently, including this stunning book of graving dock plans for Smiths Dock dating from 1906. Hand drawn and coloured on very fine linen coated with starch, the plans are still supple over 100 years after they were created and the exquisite draughtsmanship is clear to see. Every detail of the docks is meticulously drawn, including each rivet in the dock gates and even the grain of the wooden posts. The book itself is huge and very heavy and spent many years in a local law firm’s office. We’re so grateful that it survived and that the depositor brought it to the archives to be preserved for future generations.

Thanks to the lovely members of the Tees Rowing.Club for inviting us to give a River Tees talk at the clubhouse today, meandering in true river fashion from the source to the sea. It was great to share river stories and plan future talks and we’re really looking forward to accessioning the records of the club, which go back to the mid 1800’s, and working with them to catalogue the records. We can’t wait to see what untold stories and river tales we uncover!

Fantastic wander around the historic St Hilda’s district in Middlesbrough ahead of our annual coach tour with the wonderful year 6 children and staff from Linthorpe Primary next month. Exciting to see the renovation work on the iconic old town hall and the amazing public art around the town, both past and present. And thanks to Paul at the Tees Transporter Bridge who loves to share his passion for the bridge and town and who will soon be enthusing the children once again.