Keystage worked with The Samuel Ward Academy to help a local company celebrate its 250th anniversary. The Herbert Group Ltd. makes electronic scales and has its roots in the London’s Smithfield in 1760. The company wanted to celebrate this major milestone, and asked us to help design and manage a project to create a unique online exhibition of the company’s extensive, but hitherto unseen, archive. That included rare scales (some dating back to the 1760s), letters, and photographs of works outings in the 1860s, Victorian wage books, Edwardian catalogues and much more.
With the help of the school and a local web company, we led weekly sessions with a group of keen youngsters. They learnt a whole raft of new skills – from curating an exhibition to making a video from oral testimonies – as well as becoming world experts on the history of the Herbert Group.
The project was generously funded by Heritage Lottery Fund and was, they said, a pretty rare example of a collaborative heritage project between a commercial company and a school.
