Dwellbeing Shieldfield Community Archive tells the stories of a small neighbourhood just outside the city centre of Newcastle upon Tyne.
It shares stories of ordinary people, wherever they happen to have been born, coming together in this place to plant and tend vegetables, pick up rubbish, make art, play football, share a cuppa, laugh and cry together.
Like many working class areas, Shieldfield is a place that is constantly experiencing change. We hope that our archive will be used to keep exploring the joy, co-operation and solidarity in the face of struggle that we think are at the heart of Shieldfield. We also want to be honest about the challenges of living in community, and the ways these challenges can be overcome.
These are our stories.
Our Values
Dwellbeing Sheildfield is a welcoming, creative and inclusive cooperative of Shieldfield residents and community members of all ages and backgrounds.
We aim to lead Shieldfield (and other neighbourhoods like it) toward self-reliance, resilience and interdependence. We value care, creativity, honesty, openness, learning together, working together and having fun together.
Community wellbeing is at the heart of what we do as Dwellbeing Shieldfield, and any use of the archives should contribute to this in some way.
Use of the Archive
The archive includes recorded conversations between neighbours, as well as some objects and photographs that have been gifted to Dwellbeing Shieldfield.
Details of how to access the archive material are coming soon.
How We Did it Ourselves
The Archive is one of the outcomes from 100 People, a film-making project led by artist Andrew Wilson that explored the connections between people and places in this area.
100 People attempted to tell a complicated story about the different activities and relationships that make Shieldfield what it is. Community members of all ages were invited to have recorded conversations about Shieldfield and all of the video recordings were handed over to Dwellbeing to look after so that other people can make use of them in the future.
Most often, traditional archives hold the stories of those people in the past who had power and authority. This means ordinary people’s stories are often missing or hard to find. Because of this, it was important for our archive that we decide which of our stories are important to tell, and to save for the future. So we took a Do It Ourselves approach. Dwellbeing members have been involved from the start, thinking through some ethical and practical questions and creating the processes to generate and organise the archive material in ways which align with our values.
Find out more about 100 People at www.100peopleshieldfield.org