Administrative/Biographical History

On the Record are a not-for-profit co-operative (registered as a Community Interest Company), co-founded by Laura Mitchison and Rosa Schling. The organisation specialises in oral history and community archiving projects. Funding is secured for each new project from external funders, for instance the Heritage Lottery Fund. The organisation works as a co-operative, with each project relying on volunteers and participants to shape the outcome and aims. This collaborative approach means that everyone involved with a project plays an active role in recording the histories and making decisions about how the outputs are shared with others.

Scope and Content

The Doing it Ourselves archive was collected from former members of the First Neighbourhood Co-operative Nursery in 2018-19 by oral history organisation On the Record, who worked with Eva Turner, a former member of the co-operative to record the history of the nursery. The archive contains documents, photographs, ephemera, a collection of oral history interviews recorded by the project, and a record of the project's activities including audio recorded at events and photographs of the project's exhibition.

The First Neighbourhood Co-operative Nursery was a parent-led co-operative nursery that grew from a group of parents that met in Walthamstow in the late 1970s. The nursery opened its day care facility on Verulam Avenue in 1986, and closed in the mid-1990s.

Quantity

320 tiff files, 130 jpg files, 18 pdf files, 18 wav files, 18 mp3 files, 1 avi file, 1 mp4 file and physical items