Battersea Arts Centre launched its digital archive!
On Friday the 15th of November, the day of the 120th anniversary of Battersea Town Hall, we launched our digital archive! This year, we are celebrating the 120th anniversary of our Victorian town hall. From its early days as Battersea Town Hall to its current use as Battersea Arts Centre, our building has always hosted radical thinkers and their ideas. Battersea Arts Centre’s digital archive is a freely accessible website which combines materials from our building’s time as Battersea Town Hall and Battersea Arts Centre.
Among other things, our archive includes original architectural plans, programmes from the UK’s first amateur boxing club, and documentation from key performances including Jerry Springer the Opera and Punchdrunk’s Masque of the Red Death. The archive is a collaboration between Wandsworth Heritage Service (who hold the town hall collection from 1892 to 1974) and BAC (who hold the theatre archive from 1974 to present) and by unifying these collections we want to create a picture of our building’s history over the last 120 years. We’ve already uploaded 10,000 images to this website and hope that, by breaking these stories out of their boxes, many more people will engage with our history.
This archive is an ongoing project. We are still cataloguing and revealing more stories from our collections. You may find omissions and mistakes in our descriptions but we hope that you’ll help us by commenting and adding what you know. This archive has been created with the help and the stories of many artists, theatre-goers, volunteers, and Battersea residents. By contributing your story, comment or photograph, you can help us too!
We have also launched the exhibition Living Radically: 120 years of Battersea Town Hall in the waiting room of the foyer. The exhibition is a snapshot of the last 120 years, during which the building witnessed feminist speeches, socialist uprisings, tea dances, air raids, and boxing matches. John Archer, the first black mayor of a London borough was based here. Battersea MP John Burns, the first working class member of the Cabinet and proud “son of a washerwoman”, gave many speeches here. Suffragettes, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst also spoke here.
For over 30 years, the building has been home to Battersea Arts Centre. Battersea Arts Centre has continued the spirit of radicalism, building on its roots to pioneer new practice in contemporary theatre with the development of Scratch in 2000, the creation of Punchdrunk’s Masque of the Red Death in 2007 and the supporting of key UK theatre artists such as Kneehigh, Nic Green, and Kate Tempest. But we are also interested in the many thousands of people who have passed through the building, the people who worked at the Town Hall or audiences who have seen shows here.
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You can visit Battersea Town Hall’s collection at Wandsworth Heritage Service.
