The Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) enables communities to celebrate, look after and learn more about our diverse heritage. From our great museums and historic buildings, to local parks and beauty spots or recording and celebrating traditions, customs and history, HLF grants open up our nation's heritage for everyone to enjoy. HLF has supported more than 26,000 projects, allocating over £4billion across the UK. For details on future funding for parks and all other HLF programmes from 2008 to 2013, visit www.hlf.org.uk. HLF has already invested more than £400million in nearly 300 historic public parks, gardens, squares and promenades right across the UK.

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Heritage Lottery FundWebsite >

The Trading Faces online exhibition has been devised and produced by Future Histories. The exhibition makes use of archive documents, video and audio material to explore the legacy of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in British performing arts and society.

A wide range of documents were selected from a number of archives in order to illuminate the narratives of slavery in Black British performance, as well as issues relating to aesthetics and politics. Documents were digitised from the Victoria and Albert Museum Theatre Collections (Core Collections, Pamphlets collection, Temba Theatre Company, Black Mime Theatre Company, Alfred Fagon, Unity Theatre and Roundhouse Theatre), and from archives held and managed by Future Histories (Talawa Theatre Company, Nitro Theatre Company and Black Theatre Forum).

The online exhibition is a resource for research and analysis of material documenting not only the legacy of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in performance, but also contemporary forms of human trafficking. Thus the narratives of resistance produced by people of African descent, who were part of the 18th and 19th centuries Abolitionist movement, are juxtaposed with the voices of contemporary victims from China and Eastern Europe.

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Future Histories Website >

Britain’s foremost Black-led theatre company Talawa devised and delivered a Theatre-in-Education (TIE) production entitled MISSING to encourage reflection on issues related to Black British identity, the Slave Trade and the place of people of African descent in society today. This provided students with information which is currently under-represented in the national Curriculum, giving them a deeper understanding of the historical diversity of British society.

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Talawa Website >

The V&A Theatre Collections has preserved and catalogued the Talawa Theatre Company archive and selected items from the Black British performing arts collections held at the V&A Theatre Collections. Talawa Theatre Company’s archive is now available to the public for the first time at Blythe House. As part of the project the V&A has also provided pre-course work experience for a graduate student.

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V & A Website >

As part of the Archives for All programme, The National Archives have provided online access to the catalogued Talawa Theatre Company archive through the Access to Archives website.

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Access to Archives Website >