London Community Video Archive

The London Community Video Archive (LCVA) archives and shares community videos made in the1970s to the early 1990s in London and the South East.

Portable video became available in the early 1970s, and was quickly taken up by people ignored or or misrepresented in the mainstream media – particularly tenants on housing estates, community action groups, women, black and minority ethnic groups, youth, gay and lesbian people, and the disabled.

This rich heritage of Community Video is under threat of disappearing, both because the physical tapes are decaying, and, having been recorded on now obsolete formats, they are not accessible to view. LCVA is dedicated to collecting, digitising and screening these tapes, in order that they can be preserved, made use of, and reactivated in contemporary contexts.

The LCVA Website currently hosts over 80 videos from the late 1960s to the early 1990s, 25 contemporary oral history video interviews with community video practitioners and around 100 related documents and photos. We are continuing to digitise, catalogue and display newly acquired videos, and record new interviews, for our site.

We see community engagement with the archive as being as equally important to preservation, so we are continually organising screenings of the material & and encouraging its use with contemporary activist groups and other audiences.