Launching ‘Unforgotten Lives’
A night To remember…
Written by: Liberty Collard
On Wednesday 26th April 2023, the London Metropolitan Archives launched their new, year-long exhibition titled: Unforgotten Lives, Rediscovering Londoners of African, Caribbean, Asian and Indigenous Heritage, 1560 to 1860. The Mapping Black London team has had the privilege of collaborating alongside the London Metropolitan Archives for the past year to help with research for the Unforgotten Lives exhibit.
One key aim of the exhibition was to showcase the Switching the Lens (STL) dataset, a collection of over 3,300 baptism, burial and marriage records from London parish records, ranging from 1560-1840. Our team worked with the volunteer-collected dataset to create interactive formats of the Switching the Lens dataset, creating a range of different maps, which you can interact with in the exhibition space or view from home on our website.
Attendee of the launch event viewing the interactive map created by the Mapping Black London team for the exhibition.
Photo credit: Mark Martin, 2023.
With over one hundred attendees, the launch event brought together a vast number of people, including those who had contributed to the exhibition as well as members of the general public. The event allowed visitors to look around the new exhibition for the first time, view digital materials in the archive mediatheque space and have an exclusive look at some of the primary source documents used to create the exhibition.
One attendee of the launch event, Amy March commented, “it was incredible to see all the hard work of the Mapping Black London team come to life at the exhibition. The ability to interact with the digital maps that the team have created was definitely a highlight of the night. The team should be incredibly proud of the exhibition they have created.. I would recommend to anyone who has yet to see the exhibition to do so!” Another attendee, Chloe Rogers, commented, “it was great to have the chance to conduct our own searches on the digital maps using the computers in the LMA, meaning we could look at how our own familiar areas of London were lived historically.”
Research assistants, Odile Jordan and Libby Collard, sharing their experiences as undergraduate students using the archives.
Photo credit: Mark Martin, 2023.
Due to our collaboration with the LMA, the Mapping Black London team were invited to speak at the launch event. This gave us the opportunity to share our fantastic experiences of working on the exhibition research team with our colleagues, friends, family and the wider public attendees. It also gave us the chance to express how vital a resource the archive is for undergraduate students like ourselves and how much of a difference a welcoming and accessible space can make to those new to the historical field.
The launch event was both a celebration of the invaluable scholarly work done in the field in the past and an opportunity to display the new, cutting-edge research being currently developed by different research groups. Rogers continued, “the exhibition is a great display of the research done by the team at Northeastern University London, the LMA and others involved to tell the stories of those usually excluded from conversations about historical London.” The support from the public at the launch event really highlighted the key theme developed throughout our time preparing for the exhibition: the power of collaboration for giving voice to these once ‘forgotten lives.’