🎬 Watch Parties 🍿Cosy, Curious, and Collective Archiving

Did you know Dwellbeing Shieldfield has an archive? You might have read about it here (https://www.dwellbeingshieldfield.org.uk/events/100peoplearchive) when we were first setting it up.

Have you ever wondered what community archiving actually feels like? Picture the Forum Cafe, kettle on the boil, a few chairs pulled together around a table. A group of neighbours, some you know, some you’re about to, are gathered around a screen. This is a Dwellbeing Shieldfield Watch Party.

These aren’t like your average film night. They’re part memory lane, part detective work, and part storytelling session. Together, we watch unedited footage from the 100 People Shieldfield film (https://www.100peopleshieldfield.org). These are real conversations between Shieldfield residents, workers, and wanderers. As we watch, between handfuls of popcorn there is laughter, surprise, and sometimes a pause as someone says, “I remember that!” or “I didn’t know that happened here?!”

But there is a twist: we’re not just watching film footage. We’re archiving. That means discussing what we see and hear. Who’s in the clip? What events or places are mentioned? What feelings are expressed? One person might notice, “Val used to swap Panini stickers,” while another adds, “Colin teased her about the Keegan era.” It’s messy, it’s human, and it’s brilliant. A volunteer notetaker captures the key points discussed so that we can share these notes alongside the clips. We want to capture the richness of the conversations so that the film footage can be accessed by our community and others like it in future. 

This archiving is definitely work, so why do we volunteer our time - it comes to a few hours a month. Well, it's probably because it’s more than documenting what is on the film clips. It's about understanding the community and seeing it reflected back at you as a living, breathing patchwork of stories. It's a joy and privilege to help shape how those stories will be remembered.

Are you curious to know more? We’d love you to come along to a future Watch Party. You don’t need to be an archivist or a historian, just someone who cares about Shielfield and the people who live, work and play here. You’re welcome to come along just to enjoy the film footage and learn something new about the neighbourhood. If you join us at a watch party, I promise you’ll leave with a fresh sense of connection, a few new friends, and maybe a story or two of your own to share.

Shieldfield’s archive isn’t just about our community. It is our community in the act of remembering, together.

Dwellbeing Shieldfield Community Archive tells the stories of a small neighbourhood just outside the city centre of Newcastle upon Tyne. It is looked after by a volunteer working group of Dwellbeing Members which always open for more people to join.