The People’s Archive Plymouth is a community project conceived by Rob Miles from Plymouth Street Scenes & Plymouth History in late 2025 to create an online digital archive of Plymouth’s history which anybody could visit totally free of charge. He is joined by Chris Robinson MBE, local historian, writer and board member of the Plymouth Barbican Trust a charity who seeks to preserve the heritage of Plymouth’s historic Barbican and Steve Johnson of Cyberheritage. The core team is joined by a small army of volunteers who help scan physical media, research and curate the archive. I currently volunteer as a Software Engineer helping in the development of the volunteer portal and public facing website and as a Heritage Records Officer assisting in the curation of artifacts.
The project is pre-dated by South West Image Bank (SWiB), a project operated by the Plymouth Barbican Trust which inherited a large collection from two local newspapers Western Morning News & The Plymouth Herald when they vacated their premises at The Ship, Derriford. Originally SWiB had premises and archival storage on the Barbican at 25, Parade. In the late 2010s Plymouth City Council expanded the local museum known as “The Box” and the SWiB archive was moved to the museum’s archival storage. It was hoped that the original SWiB volunteers could continue to index, research and curate the archive however the COVID pandemic hampered this capability and post-COVID the project received very little traction. It is hoped the People’s Archive Plymouth project will help reinvigorate the progress made on the SWiB archive and with the support of the Plymouth Barbican Trust make the materials from the archive available online for all.