Express & Star online photo archive team celebrate launch

And thousands have already taken a tour of the new the Express & Star Photo Archive.

The project is a pioneering partnership between the Express & Star, the University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton City Archives and the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

It was launched this week – and in the first 24 hours more than 2,300 people took a look, between them looking at more than 30,000 online pages.

Around 3,000 historic photos of the Black Country and its surrounding areas have been digitised for future generations

The project is a partnership between the Express & Star, the University of Wolverhampton and the National Lottery Heritage Fund, and has seen thousands of people view images online dating from 1970s to 1990.

The 3,000 images published on the website as part of the £60,000 National Lottery project include photos taken during steel industry operations and during the final years of the mining industry.

• Take a look at the archive by visiting photo-archive.expressandstar.co.uk

They include gems like the photo above from September 1979 showing men who had been axed when British Steel closed the Bilston works but who had gone on to pass a welding test at a privately-owned welding school. The men were sponsored by the British Steel Corporation in a course at the Midland Welding School on Wulfrun Industrial Estate.

The photos on the website look at the rich industry of our region and the people who worked tirelessly in factories that have now largely disappeared.

Its success is testament to volunteers who gave up the equivalent of 260 working days to document and archive images from the Express & Star photographic library.

An archivist, representative from the University of Wolverhampton, project volunteer and a former Express & Star photographer were invited to Queen Street to take a look at the physical archive and to be interviewed by the BBC.

Scott Knight, from the University of Wolverhampton, said talks began about the project 10 years ago, and after hundreds of hours of work from volunteers the website went live this week.

He said: "Now we're set up to do more, it's just trying to get funding.

"There's 800 Second World War pictures which we could do for as little as £1 per photo.

"It's absolutely vitally important for local people to be able to see these pictures.

"There are changes in architecture, the industry, the landscape, it has all changed so much.

"The page views on the website and the response on social media has been fantastic. We put up a photo of six Payton brothers from Wolverhampton who had been to war and some distant family members responded."

Heidi McIntosh, senior archivist at Wolverhampton City Archives, added: "My role was about advising on how to store images, package it properly, and I also supervised a lot of the volunteers and told them how to list photos and which key words to look out for as we have a lot of researchers coming in all the time so I know what they look for."

Brian Lester, from Kingswinford, started volunteering after he retired from his job as a teacher. He said: "I started volunteering about five years ago, we would sift and sort through bundles of photographs and would categorise them.

"You'd look through and occasionally you'd see someone you know who was obviously a lot younger in the photographs.

"The interesting thing for me was the social history, how things have changed and how life has evolved.

"It's a really interesting project because it's really important for future generations to be able to access images easily."

Chris Leggett, marketing and communications director at MNA Media, said the Express & Star was contacted by a relative of a man in a photo posted on social media.

He said: "Someone contacted us and said the man in the picture was their late father and they said they hadn't got many pictures of him and asked for a copy - it really meant something to them."

Dave Bagnall, from Ironbridge, worked as a photographer for the Express & Star between 1978 and 2007.

He said: "I had a look at the website and I recognised a photo I took of some Ever Ready workers who were marching against a closure of one of their factories in Park Lane.

"I remembered exactly where I stood when I took the picture.

"People love nostalgia, old photos have a real value to them. I'm really looking forward to being able to see more photographs."

Sue Beardsmore, from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, said: "Projects like this are great because the money comes from people who play the lottery and this is making these images accessible to people, so it's a real virtuous circle."