Canvey Community Archive

Canvey Community Archive was launched in April 2008. It was formed in partnership with the Essex Record Office, Essex County Council Libraries and East of England Museums Libraries and Archives but is run by the people of Canvey Island.

After only three months online the site was one of the regional winners in the Nationwide Community & Heritage Awards.

Since our launch we have gone from strength to strength. We currently have 8,500 pages of Canvey history and photos. We have over a 1000 online readers registered and have around 13,000 site hits per month.

In 2015 we were fortunate to receive a Heritage Lottery Fund Award which was used to increase and update our equipment. It was also an opportunity to make our archive more visible ‘Taking the Archive to the People’ as many older people still had not heard about us mainly because they did not have access to a computer. We have achieved everything we set out to do. We are now holding bi-monthly meetings with speakers from local organisations, monthly sessions in the library and also in the Heritage Centre. Our most important achievement is being accepted as a Learning Destination by the Childrens’ University. The whole year with the Heritage Lottery was concluded by a History Trail where all the museums on the Island were open along with us and other organisations in a local hall with vintage buses running from venue to venue. It was a great success with many new contacts and even more photos and stories to add to our website.

In 2019 we completely redid our site and since then we have gone from strength to strength. Post pandemic we changed direction slightly. We had to forgo our meetings but we have continued and increased our local exhibitions and visits. We have helped to save a local papers archive adding about 2000 photos to our site and currently getting ready to scan their vast collection of negatives. We have found a great deal of interesting material that has added immensely to the story of our island in the Thames.