Lots of different people are represented in our collections. Royal Museums Greenwich holds historic images from every inhabited continent, featuring people from many different cultures. This includes diaspora communities here in Britain.
Royal Museums Greenwich is perhaps better known for its images of Royal Navy admiral Horatio Nelson and Tudor monarch Elizabeth I but you can also meet figures like Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture, Indian shipbuilder Jamsetjee Bomanjee Wadia and Tongan queen Sālote Tupou III alongside them in our galleries.
Even more people appear in our wider collections (most museums, including ours, only have a small percentage of their objects on display at any one time). This diverse array includes everyone from Japanese samurai and Māori leaders to Sierra Leonean undertakers and Sri Lankan tea pluckers. Royal Museum Greenwich is working hard to make these images available.
Unlocking Collections
Unlocking Collections is an ambitious research project aimed at finding overlooked images from within our collections and making them more accessible. It is currently focusing on South Asian, Japanese, Black British, Caribbean, West African and Chinese images.
Museum collections like ours are big and complex; searching them can be difficult and very time consuming. Cataloguing backlogs, colonial-era labelling and institutional peculiarities are just some of the many obstacles that can hinder researchers looking through our 2.5 million objects.
Unlocking Collections seeks to overcome these barriers through better cataloguing, mass digitisation and a set of new, targeted research guides. It is led by Dr Aaron Jaffer, our Curator of World History and Cultures, and relies on our team of Collections & Archives Research Volunteers (CARVs) to help with searching. Since 2017, CARVs have been spending many hours each week searching through our collections. Recruitment opportunities are listed on our Volunteering page.
The first of the project’s free research guides, covering South Asia, will be available to download soon.