Tyne Theatre & Opera House Volunteers Receive Heritage Heroes Award

A group of research volunteers at Grade I listed Newcastle theatre, Tyne Theatre & Opera House (TT&OH), have been nationally recognised for their service to the UK’s heritage sector.

The Heritage Heroes Awards are the Heritage Alliance’s celebration of the outstanding contribution Britain’s heritage volunteers make to society.

Over a 12-month period, a team of community volunteers from Tyne Theatre & Opera House gathered and reviewed over 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 volunteer team at the Heritage Alliance’s conference in London on Thursday 7 March.

Project Administrator, Rachel 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 1200 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 for their commitment to this project.”

The searchable database is a valuable resource for academics, theatre historians and genealogists, and can be found at: https://www.tynetheatreandoperahouse.uk/about/performance-calendar-database/.

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 ambitious restoration plans.

Image: TT&OH Project Administrator Rachel Snape and volunteer Charmian Marshall receive the Heritage Heroes Award from Dr Ingrid Samuel OBE, Acting Chair of Heritage Alliance. Credit: The Heritage Alliance, Heritage Day 2024