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Case Study - Crystal Palace Fans’ Centenary Project
Your Heritage
Crystal Palace Fans’ Centenary Project
£50,000
21 Months
Summary
Crystal Palace Football Club was founded in 1905 and has had its home at Selhurst Park in Greater London since 1924. The Eagles, as the club is known, is an important source of local pride and passion.
A group of fans set up the project to celebrate the centenary of the football club in the season 2005-6. Supporters contributed their memories of the story of the club through interviews undertaken by trained volunteers at home and on match days in a Vox Pop portacabin.
A virtual museum was created of recorded reminiscences and images from a number of private collections of Club memorabilia, and this formed the basis of a teaching pack for local schools. An Education Officer, an Administrator and a Multimedia Content Creator were employed to help deliver the project.
The aims of the project
- To highlight how the Club has shaped local identity and the lives of the individual fans, families and the wider community that form its heart.
- To collect memories from supporters in recorded, pictorial and written formats and make these available through a virtual museum.
- To create a teaching pack using the material collected to show that football can be used in a way to inspire pupils to learn about local geography, history, art and citizenship.
Benefits for heritage
- Digital preservation copies of 250 oral history recordings were deposited with Croydon Museum for future generations to enjoy.
- The project increased awareness and understanding of the history of the club amongst its supporter base and the local community.
Benefits for people
- 60 local schools received the teaching pack and 10 took part in outreach sessions for Key Stages 3 and 4. A pupil commented: “I never knew so much happened here. Can you tell us more exciting stories about what happened?”
- Around 25,000 local people benefited as subscribers to the virtual museum, as interviewees, contributors or as volunteers.
- The project strengthened the club’s role in shaping people’s local identity and pride in their area.
- The project broadened inter-generational discussion and family links.
- The 100 volunteers acquired new skills including oral history interviewing, basic literacy and communication skills.
Lessons learnt
- Timetable was underestimated as recruitment, writing and production of the education pack took longer than expected.
- The project would have benefited from more media exposure.
- The interviewers found that the minidisk recorders were not user friendly and that more training with an expert user would have helped.
- More time for editing and uploading interviews was needed.
Long term benefits
- Local schools cited that the project had demonstrated the value of using football as a means of teaching a variety of subjects.
- More information is available on the project website.
The budget
|
Main Project Costs
|
£
|
Funding
|
£
|
|
Equipments /
materials
|
10,500
|
Other Grants
|
14,500
|
|
Staff / recruitment
|
33,500
|
Non-cash contributions
|
25,000 |
| Training and travel |
4,500 |
HLF grant (56%) |
50,000 |
| Design / writing / printing education material |
10,000 |
|
|
| Volunteer labour |
25,000 |
|
|
| Contingency |
6,000 |
|
|
| |
|
Total costs
|
89,500
|
Young Crystal Palace fans at Selhurst Park
Sector
Cultures and Memories
Activity
Participation; Learning