A key aspect of Pass It On is the creation of a publicly accessible archive for Chichester Festival Theatre to be housed at West Sussex Records Office. This will give unprecedented access to the fascinating story behind Chichester Festival Theatre’s development.
At the start of the project there were 1,000 boxes of unsorted material – 250 which had been deposited in West Sussex Record Office in the 1980s and 750 that the Theatre was storing itself.
In the first eighteen months of the project we sorted over 600 of these boxes and listed over 1800 folders or packets of archival material.
This box sorting process was originally thought would last until the end of the project but with the great work of a host of volunteers and our former Archive Training Officer, Gillian Edom,this was all achieved well ahead of schedule.
In September 2014 the Pass It On team expanded to include a full time archivist Nick Corbo-Stewart who by the end of October 2014 had roughly categorised the content of our archive and has continued the cataloging process in order to make our archive publicly accessible.
Archiving the material the theatre has amassed over the past fifty plus years is a huge task, but incredibly worthwhile. We have been able to support writers and researchers in their work by supplying them with items from the archive, ensuring the history and heritage of Chichester Festival Theatre not only survives, but thrives.
Some of the gems from our archive can be found on the Digital Archive page.
For more information, please contact [email protected]
