Gloucester Rugby Football Club was established in 1873 and is one of the oldest in the world. Over the years, many of the archives and artefacts that together tell the club’s story had been scattered and hidden from the public. When work began on a new south stand, 30 boxes of forgotten historic memorabilia almost ended up in a skip. Instead, volunteers used this lucky find as the starting point for an ambitious project to explore and safeguard the history of the club.

Gloucestershire Archives preserves and provides public access to the documents, photographs and recording that represent the cultural and corporate memory of the county. The Friends of Gloucestershire Archives brought material related to Gloucester Rugby Football Club’s long history together for the first time to create an online community archive, learning resources and displays.

The volunteer team catalogued the club’s previously undocumented material and also collected memorabilia from the local community, including match-day programmes, photographs, shirts and players’ medals. Volunteer training covered a range of heritage skills such as handling and packing artefacts, indexing and cataloguing to ensure the collection would be documented to a high standard.

Memories of 13 supporters, officials and players, some from as far back as the 1930s, were recorded and an audio-visual history of the club was produced to complement the other online material, creating a rich digital resource. Two teachers worked alongside the volunteers to develop online, cross-curricular learning resources for primary and secondary schools.

The team organised events to encourage the local community to get involved, including a heritage open day, family learning weeks and a launch event. The project activities were promoted through a road-show, in the local media, at local schools and other rugby clubs, and in match-day programmes and a ‘fanzine’.

The online archive became a permanent, publicly accessible record of the club’s heritage and enabled the local and wider community to appreciate its role in the history of the city.