The Liverpool St Helens Heritage Project

Liverpool St Helens Football Club has been awarded a grant of £75,700 by the Heritage Lottery Fund to support a heritage project that will celebrate the unique history of the club.

The project got underway in January this year and will highlight the Club’s place in the international history of rugby in a variety of ways:

• Creating a fully accessible archive that tells the story of the formation and evolution of the Club from its birth in 1857, as Liverpool Football Club, making it the oldest open rugby club in the world
• Encouraging the donation of new items from private collections to the archive to complete the story of the Club
• Developing our understanding of the Club’s history and of the heritage that is shared by Rugby League and Union
• Increasing access to this shared heritage and the distinctive history of the club by reaching out to new audiences.
• Creating new learning opportunities for schools, students and the local community, focused on the heritage of the club and the care of the archive

Working in Partnership

The project team will be working with key partners, including Liverpool Record Office, Edge Hill University, Cowley International College and St Helens College.
Our partners will be involved with work on the archive and with the creation of new resources to make it more accessible.

Project Activities

Our partners are central to the project and will help us to share the archive with as wide an audience as possible, by carrying out a range of key activities:

• Students on placement will work with our project archivist to catalogue and digitise the archive
• Students will help to curate a touring exhibition which will showcase the archive and tell the story of the club
• A new website will follow the work on the archive and share information about items as they are rediscovered and catalogued
• A new booklet about the history of the Club will be published, bringing the story of Liverpool St Helens to life
• Students from St Helens College will design the exhibition, booklet and promotional materials
• Outreach work will take place alongside the exhibition, and an educational resource for schools will encourage them to visit and learn about the Club’s heritage