A group of research volunteers at Newcastle's Tyne Theatre & Opera House has been recognised at the Heritage Heroes Awards.
Over 12 months, a team of community volunteers gathered and reviewed more than 23,000 images of newspaper adverts, programmes and day-bills to create a performance database covering 52 years from the theatre’s opening in 1867 to its conversion to a cinema in 1919.
Volunteer Charmian Marshall and TT&OH Project Administrator Rachel Snape received the Heritage Heroes award on behalf of the team at the Heritage Alliance’s conference in London on 7 March.
Snape, said, “we are delighted that our volunteers have been recognised for their work on Tyne Theatre & Opera House’s performance calendar. Between them, they have dedicated over 1,200 hours of research, and in turn brought to light decades of our theatre’s rich and varied history. We are so very grateful to them fortheir commitment to this project.”
The searchable database can be found on the theatre's web site. The research work was part of a one-year heritage project funded by The National Lottery Heritage Fund, which included restoration of the theatre’s Victorian stage machinery and initial investigations into further restoration plans.