Explore Your Archive: Celebrating One Year at Y Storfa

Y Storfa is celebrating its first anniversary on Thursday 3 December, and they're marking it with a free afternoon of talks and tours. It's part of Explore Your Archive week, when archive services across the UK and Ireland open their doors to the public, share their collections, and offer advice from staff and community history experts alongside behind-the-scenes tours. The whole thing is organised by Archives and Records Council Wales.

The main draw is two presentations, both in English. Mónica Jato gives Wales and the Basque Children of 1937: Community-curated exhibitions as itinerant archives, following the stories of the nearly 40,000 children evacuated from the Basque Country during the Spanish Civil War, and how archives, museums, artists, memory activists and local communities bring those experiences to life. Alex Langlands gives Mapping Margam: How archive maps and plans can unlock past landscapes, showing how old maps and plans can reconstruct lost landscapes, with reference to ongoing work at Margam Park where geophysical survey has identified one of the largest Roman villas in Wales. Both draw on local archives.

The afternoon also marks one year since Y Storfa opened as the public front door of the West Glamorgan Archive Service on Oxford Street. It's a free event: arrival and refreshments from 13:30, with the presentations starting at 14:00. You'll find it at Y Storfa, West Glamorgan Archive Service, 277-278 Oxford Street, Swansea SA1 3EL.