Goole exhibition starts 5 February and 2018 roundup - 18 December 2018

​The beginning of 2018 marked the end of Heritage Lottery Fund funding for the project but undaunted and committed, we continued to release several stories each week and prepared for the exhibition at Beverley which was shown throughout May and June 2018.

• Head to the gallery, featuring images from Our Histories Revealed at Beverley.

This second exhibition was smaller in scale and had a more of an East Yorkshire slant in the curation. We were ecstatic to realise yet another hugely successful response as a follow-up to the first exhibition in Hull during its first year as UK’s City of Culture in 2017. We were privileged to receive visitors once again from across the country and further afield, from Eastern Europe.

After such intensive output for over two years, the project has been scaled back although the considerable resource bank has continued to prove invaluable to others who have used some of the information to extend their own work and follow up on different angles.

Marcus Bailey was included in an exhibition led by Leeds Museum, comprised of full life-size portraits. The exhibition was held at Kirkstall Abbey to commemorate the centenary of Armistice Day (image courtesy of Andrew Edwards of BBC Radio Leeds).

(L-R) Project Lead Gifty Burrows, artist Suman Kaur, invited guests Yvonne Desplanque (granddaughter of Marcus Bailey) and Yvonne’s husband Albert.

We have been contacted by several families who have discovered snippets of their own family’s histories by coming across the website and many academics who have used the project as a model to develop paths of community engagement in their own projects. We have been pleased to share our expertise and experiences with others. 

In the last few months alone, we have lent our voice to work a number of organisations:

• Black History Month website and magazine
• Fawcett Society
• Historic England
• Maritime Archaeology Trust (pg. 25-27)
• Leeds Museums with artist Suman Kaur
• University of Cambridge

Additionally, we have supported individuals in further education colleges and schools, as well as helping out with blog posts.

A cut-out of Marcus, surrounded by the group including Joe Williams of Heritage Corner Leeds.

Thank you to everyone who has expressed an interest in the project, to those who have used our resource (and have acknowledged it), to the families who continue to contact us with queries and to private and public insights into their histories. We are simply delighted that since starting on this journey back in 2015 we have ignited the curiosity to explore Black history in local communities which then feeds into Britain’s narratives.

We are delighted that the East Yorkshire exhibition will be showing at Goole Museum from 5 February to 6 April 2019. 

We’re also working to respond to a further request to show the larger Hull exhibition again and we will share more when we have news.