The performance archive that lives in a shed.
Twenty years of South London cabaret, catalogued by one woman, in a garden shed in Forest Hill. We spent an afternoon with the archivist who has, almost by accident, become the most reliable witness to a scene nobody else was keeping records of.
The shed is at the back of a Victorian terrace in Forest Hill, on a sloping garden that has, over a decade and a half, been gradually given over to its current single purpose. The shed is small — perhaps three metres by two — and it is, floor to ceiling, full.
What it is full of, the woman who maintains it tells me as we step in, is the records of about twenty years of South London cabaret. Posters. Flyers. Programmes. Set lists, handwritten on the backs of envelopes. Photographs in shoeboxes. A small but growing collection of audio recordings on minidisc and, more recently, on hard drive. Letters from performers, from venues, from the occasional landlord. Receipts.
There are, she estimates, somewhere between sixty and eighty thousand objects. She has catalogued, she thinks, roughly forty per cent of them, with the rest waiting in marked boxes for her attention.
How it started
The archive began, she says, by accident. In the early 2000s, she was working as a part-time stage manager at a small venue in Kennington that has since closed. The venue had no archival policy, and when it shut, the entire back office's worth of paperwork — performer agreements, set lists, the venue's photographic record of every show it had hosted — was about to be thrown in a skip.
She took it home. There were perhaps fifteen boxes. She had no plan for what to do with them. They sat in her spare room for two years.
What changed, she tells me, was a phone call from a researcher writing a book about London's late-night cabaret scene. The researcher had been told, by someone who knew someone, that the woman in Forest Hill might have some old paperwork that could be useful. The woman dug out the boxes, found exactly what the researcher needed within an hour, and realised — with a jolt of something between pride and dread — that she was now an archivist.
The growth
Over the following ten years, the archive grew by word of mouth. A venue closing would call her. A performer giving up the scene would post her a box. Once, memorably, an entire estate was bequeathed to her by the executor of a cabaret promoter she had never met but who had heard, somehow, that she would know what to do with his papers.
"Most of the people who appear in these boxes," she said, "do not appear anywhere else. There is no other record. If I throw it out, it is gone."
The collection is now distributed, she says, across this shed and four smaller storage units rented for the purpose. The shed holds the working part — the half she is currently cataloguing — and the digital backup, which lives on a small server bought second-hand from a friend who runs a recording studio.
What she keeps
The rule, she tells me, is permissive. She keeps almost everything. She has a small set of conditions — nothing that infringes a performer's stated wishes, nothing that contains personal data she has no permission to hold — but otherwise she takes what comes.
The reason is not nostalgia. It is, she says, that she does not know what will turn out to matter. Cabaret as a form is poorly documented in the institutional sense; the performers are often working outside the categories that funding bodies and universities recognise; the venues come and go. The records she keeps are often the only records that exist.
"Most of the people who appear in these boxes," she said, sitting on a low stool between two stacks of file boxes, "do not appear anywhere else. There is no other record. If I throw it out, it is gone."
How it is used
The archive is used, in practice, by a small number of researchers, journalists, and occasionally the performers themselves. The woman maintains a hand-written index — a spiral-bound notebook, kept on the shelf nearest the door — which lists by name, by year, and by venue everything she has so far catalogued.
Researchers contact her by email and arrange to visit. She makes them tea, sits them at a small table in the shed, and pulls the relevant boxes. Visits typically last between two and six hours. She charges nothing, but accepts donations to cover the cost of acid-free archival folders, which she replaces in rotation as her budget allows.
Once or twice a year, a former performer turns up, asking to see their own material. These visits, she tells me, are the most emotionally difficult of her work. People come because they want to remember, but they also come because they want to know that someone has not forgotten. The answer is: she has not.
What happens next
The future of the archive is, by her own admission, uncertain. She has had conversations with two universities. Neither has yet committed. The financial and physical demands of taking on a collection of this size are considerable, and the academic interest in the material is — for now — not quite enough to make the case.
She is, in the meantime, continuing. She works on the archive most weekday mornings, between about half-nine and noon. She catalogues a box at a time. She estimates, with a smile, that at her current pace she will complete the catalogue in approximately the year 2049.
I do not doubt that she will be there, in 2049, in the same shed, on the same low stool, looking up at the same shelves and writing in the same spiral-bound notebook. Whether anyone else will be paying attention by then is — as she put it, on the way out — somebody else's problem to solve.