This month, we have delivered our first subsidized creative workshops for members of the community. Taking inspiration from our Riverside Icons coasters, we invited their illustrator Wilfrid Wood to lead a sculpting session for twenty people. Each participant chose their favourite Riverside Icon and, instructed by Wilfrid, created a plasticine model of them from scratch. To aid inspiration, the group worked to a playlist of some of Riverside’s most famous musical guests including David Bowie, Amy Winehouse and Yoko Ono. At the end of the session, each artist was photographed with their creation for a future exhibition, which will showcase their work.
Also, we were able to provide a history tour for a group of students and professors from a university in Maryland, USA. They had little knowledge of Riverside Studios when they arrived but left with new-found enthusiasm for us and our heritage. We discovered that, amongst the group, were fans of Doctor Who, The Old Grey Whistle Test and Amy Winehouse, who were delighted to learn about Riverside’s connection to these cultural icons. Aside from visiting Studio 1, the group also got the rare chance to visit Riverside’s TV production galleries which allowed them to compare our modern production methods with those depicted in our BBC photographic exhibition.
This month, we bid farewell to our grey and blue Dalek, which (who?) returned to the BBC’s Perivale site, and welcomed an eye-catching red and black Dalek, kindly loaned to us by John Escolme of the BBC’s History department. Riverside is synonymous with Doctor Who, so it’s great to be able to commemorate that part of our heritage by displaying one of the programme’s most iconic characters.
As the cataloguing of our archive continues, Hope provides us with an update on the process and other events which have taken place this month:
“It’s been a busy few months! A few weeks ago, we welcomed our new volunteer Warry van Klaveren to the archive. Warry has lived locally for many years and was a professional dancer performing in London in the 1980s, so he has an intimate knowledge of both Riverside and London’s dance scene. He’s currently helping me box list our collection and is doing a great job. He even found himself amongst our collection – in a photograph on a flyer for a dance performance from NYC in 1978!
With excellent additional help from volunteer Holden, we’ve currently made it to 210 boxes. We’re hoping to work through all 371 boxes and have them listed and rearranged before Christmas.
We’ve also secured an archive cataloguing system, so we’ll be ready to start building our catalogue in January 2023. Keep your eyes peeled in the new year for a catalogue of parts of the collection to be available online.
Alongside my box listing, getting items out for visitors and getting the archive set up with the hardware and software it needs, I’ve also been busy shouting about Riverside Studios at the Archive and Records Association conference. I met plenty of fellow professionals and, despite being the new kid on the archive block, a lot of people had heard about us through the grapevine. Riverside’s reputation clearly precedes it!”
Our second creative workshop with Wilfrid Wood took place this month. Wilfrid has been all over the news recently after his sculpture of the new Prime Minister Liz Truss went viral, appearing on everything from the pages of The Guardian to This Morning. Again, we welcomed a group of people from our local community who each selected a Riverside Icon and created a plasticine sculpture of them. As with our first creative workshop, it was a lot of fun exploring and modelling some of the key figures who have shaped Riverside’s history.