The Rewind project
Our project ‘Rewind 7 decades of stories from Leonard Cheshire’ ran from 2014-2017, giving people the chance to learn more about our history in years gone by through films, photographs, journals and oral history interviews.
Rewind was supported by a grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund and the Foyle Foundation, allowing the Leonard Cheshire Archive to digitise, preserve for the future, and make available to the public many archive items related to the charity’s history.
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- A group of participants at a Rewind workshop
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- The Rewind Team at Sharpe’s Pottery Museum
The grant has also provided the opportunity to run heritage workshops with current service users, staff and volunteers to continue to gather peoples’ stories and memories.
The project digitised over 600 items from the Leonard Cheshire Archive including 10 films held at the British Film Institute and all issues of our in-house journal – The Cheshire Smile, which was first published in 1954 and ran until 1999.
The project has focused on the histories and stories of several of the early ‘Cheshire homes’ including:
Alder House (previously Three Forests), Chigwell, Essex
Chipstead Lake, Sevenoaks, Kent
Heatherley, Copthorne, West Sussex
Hydon Hill, Godalming, Surrey
Le Court, Liss, Hampshire
Mote House, Maidstone, Kent
Sobell Lodge, Staplehurst, Kent
St Cecilia’s, Bromley, Kent.
You can watch a subtitled film about our project at the bottom of this page, and keep up to date with the current work of the Leonard Cheshire Archive by reading our blog.
The Leonard Cheshire Archive
Our archive was set up by our founder Group Captain Leonard Cheshire in 1985 to preserve the memory of those volunteers, staff, trustees, residents and service users who had been involved with his work and charities. More information on how to access the archive is available by clicking this link.