Heritage Lottery Funding Bid

 

Progress

Hours of discussion, paperwork, statements of interest, meetings etc are starting to come together for Winters. We had a hunch there would be some interest based on the amazing support we got from the public during last years Heritage Open Days. There are of course no guarantees but we are hearing the right noises going in to this final stage of application.

When will we know?

Our full complete application is submitted in two weeks and we should have an answer by July. Our thoughts? We can't help but dream big!

Over the side entrance - three 'Ws' and 1867

The dream!

We will need your help to turn the dreams in to reality. We hope to dip our toe in the water with an archiving work room and bring those plate negatives back to life but this is just the beginning. It is developing 'Friends of Winters' that will be the foundation of things to come. We need a body of people who want to be active in restoring, conserving and developing every aspect of our heritage with emphasis on the building (which already has a grade 2 listing) and access to the public.

The ceiling cornicing on the left is currently hidden by a lower false ceiling. Wouldn't it be lovely to have all these architectural details revealed?

Outcomes...

Will it be a museum? A center for study? A center for learning? Is it important to 'travel back in time' and realise a museum studio; to catalogue all the images onsite; to transfer skills and knowledge of traditional photography? We believe that all these things are important, but you will have to drive the project (with our full support) whilst we concentrate on the day-to-day running of the business and our lovely 21st century customers.
We are hugely grateful to our current list of volunteers offering their help. Do get in touch if you are also interested in cataloguing and archiving. However, also let us know if you would like something to really get your teeth into. Do you have a passion for heritage and / or photography? May be you have some project management experience, or have worked on similar projects in the past? We want to hear from you please!

 How many feet have trodden these stairs. Look at the curve in the lead where 150 years of wear is showing.

 

Get in touch

Email us on office@wwwinter.co.uk to let us know. There is no commitment at this stage. We are simply putting together a pool of interested parties. who will love and cherish this place as we do :-)

Winter's in Artsbeat Magazine

We were visited last month by the rather brilliant Amanda Penman of Artsbeat Magazine who has written a lovely article on the business and the 'behind-the-scenes' of the history of the company often invisible behind the running of a modern portrait photography studio.
We have already had feedback from the feature with offers of help for the project-in-waiting that is our photo archive. Our Heritage Lottery Funding bid is now being processed (fingers crossed) and if successful we will be able to move into phase one. This will involve renovation of the old colour dark room and kitting it out as a workroom for archiving. At this point we will need you! We are really grateful for the offers so far but do keep them coming in; whether it's a casual interest in photography and / or history or you have previous experience of a similar project we promise to keep you in tea and coffee!

Owner and MD, Hubert Weston King, wanted to say a big thanks to both Amanda, and to Nick Lockett for photographing here for the magazine.
Behind Hubert you can see a small indication of the archives held here. Each box is filled with negatives, some portraits, some from industrial work. Times this by many times over and you start to see the nature of the task ahead of us.

Contact us by email on office@wwwinter.co.uk if you would like to get involved, and follow our Friends of Winters Facebook page for regular updates and snippets of the goodies we come across.

Louisa and Angela upstairs in the old daylight retouching room with examples of Victorian portraiture. It is this part of the archives that we would like to make more accessible to the public via a small museum.