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David Knights-Whittome glass plate negative collection awarded £95K by Heritage Lottery Fund

I am pleased to announce that the Heritage Lottery Fund has awarded the London Borough of Sutton Archives £95,900 towards the digitisation, conservation, cataloguing and research of the David Knights-Whittome glass plate negtaive collection. An additional £10K from Sutton Council means a total of nearly £106,000 for the project.

The project will see 11,000 Edwardian images cleaned, digitised, researched, catalogued and made available to the public. The glass plate negatives were taken between 1904 and 1917 by photographer David Knights-Whittome.

The majority of the pictures depict local people, while the rest are an eclectic mix of images of the interior and exterior of stately homes throughout the UK and Europe. There are also images of three generations of the Royal family; local and regional schools, colleges and theatre groups; and weddings.

Sutton Archives is recruiting a team of volunteers who will be trained to handle, clean and digitise the glass plates, and to catalogue and research the images. Volunteers will also contribute to a blog which will record the project.

As part of this two year project there will be sessions for the public and local historians to research their own World War 1 ancestryand learn how to care for their own photo collections. Sutton Mencap will be involved in a project which will involve people with learning disabilities using the images as an inspiration for their own artwork.

Further details from Kath Shawcross, Borough Archivist & Local Studies Manager

k.shawcross@sutton.gov.uk