Thank You to St Ives Arts Club, Janet Axten, Ethan Carney & Val Thomas. All donations will go towards our move expenses.
More information here: https://youtu.be/_nnsk8GZXUE?si=2Y50ezPkQ_s6RzX4
Category: Events
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Pop Up Shop
We are delighted to be hosting a pop up shop and a small exhibition during the September Festival.
We are so grateful to be sponsored by the Pilchard Press, and will be in situ from 10:00 – 16:00 at the Salvation Army Hall on Sunday 21 September 2025.
Come and see how plans for the Market House are progressing and grab a bargain.
For one day only huge SALE on many of our publications.
See you there
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Island Road School Talk
St Ives Archive are delighted to announce another quiz and raffle night hosted by St Ives Liz’s Quizzes. The quiz starts at 8pm and teams can be any size, at £5 per person. We look forward to seeing you there!
St Ives Archive have been very lucky to be selected as charity of the month at the Engine Inn at Cripplesease. This means the money raised from all fundraising events they hold in February will be donated to the Archive.
Events include a quiz every Tuesday night in February.
The quiz starts at 7.30pm and teams of up to 6 can enter, for £2 per person. Booking is essential either online or by phoning 01736 780793. Then register your team at 7.15 for the 7.30 start.
Also, every Friday in February, there is a Meat Raffle, £1 per strip.
A big thank you to the Engine Inn for supporting us in February! We hope to see some of you there next month.
This year we opened the Market House in March and August to enable the local community and visitors to view the interiors for the first time in over 70 years. This has provided a great opportunity to share our thoughts with those who visited and to learn what potential future users might want from the new Archive space. On both days we used a questionnaire to gather thoughts and information to help inform what services we offer. Both events were a great success and were well attended; we received 58 responses representing roughly a quarter of all those attending.
We asked have you visited the Archive before and 43% said that they had either visited when we were in the town centre before or at Carbis Bay. Encouragingly we had 27 new visitors who had not visited the Archive before in either location.
Nearly all visitors (92%) knew what an archive does which means we are currently attracting those who are already interested and those who were invited. Our future challenge will be to make the collection more accessible to those who would not normally use an archive or know what it does.
There was overwhelming support when asked about the Archive moving back into town. Some example responses are: Brilliant use of the Market House due to its history, Good place to drop into, Exciting to have in town for all to see and many thought it was simply a good idea.
Asked whether you are more likely to visit in the future when in town, 99% of those responding said yes and a fifth of those said they would visit more. This level of response shows significant support for moving into town and away from the premises in Carbis Bay.
When asked if we were to have exhibitions on local topics would they be of interest, we had 54 responses (93% ) all of which said yes and we received a huge number of ideas, here are just some of them:
- Old Photographs
- Old St Ives
- Local history, artists, photography
- Businesses past
- History of sailing, lighthouses, shipwrecks
- Local history, artists,
- Church, mining
- Artists, local artists, history
- Old shops, how things used to be
- The Jumbos
- Rowing
- Fish processing, tin mines and workers, Cornish traditions
- Railways, branch line
- Old characters in the town ‘Limpy’ etc.
- How the town became a centre for art
- History of St Ives and surrounding area
- World War 2 including evacuation, prisoners and crimes, events associated with The Market House
This has provided us with some valuable ideas for exhibitions and we are open to more. If you would like to contact us through this website with more ideas you will be most welcome, we want to make what we do at the Archive both relevant and interesting to the community of St Ives and its visitors.
As a final question we asked if we were to have a bookshop would you support it and 93% of respondents were in support of this idea.
The Archive Trustees and volunteers thoroughly enjoyed opening the premises for a viewing prior to the refurbishment works being carried out. Our thanks go to the St Ives Town Council for affording us this opportunity to begin to share our new home more widely.
In October this year two heritage-based organisations in St Ives were fortunate to be awarded a training grant of £350 from the Association of Independent Museums (AIM). The grant was awarded for a conservator-led training day about the care of collections, held on 27 November 2024, which was well timed as both organisations are currently going through a period of change and improvement.
This event provided a great opportunity for 30 volunteers from St Ives Archive and St Ives Museum to share a day together on a training topic of mutual interest to both and also to meet socially over a sandwich and cup of tea at lunchtime.
Victoria Stevens, an experienced conservator, led the day with great energy and humour notwithstanding having to start out for St Ives at 4am in the morning. The day was divided into two parts with the topic of handling and cleaning collections in the morning and housing and basic conservation in the afternoon. There was lively debate about managing the environmental conditions for both organisations, especially in granite buildings by the sea. The afternoon session included how to remove adhesive tape from documents which touched on the ethical dilemma of whether it should be removed at all!
Overall the day was judged a great success by those attending and thanks go to AIM and Tregenna Castle Resort Hotel for making it all possible.
You are invited to the Archive’s next Pub Quiz on Friday 1st November!
The Quiz and Raffle will kick off at 7.30pm for an 8pm start at Polmanter Touring Park in St Ives.
🎟️ £5 per person
🙋 No limit on team numbers
Let us know if you plan on attending and forming a team by emailing admin@stivesarchive.org.
We hope to see you there!
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Alfred Wallis Talk Recap
On 16 September as part of the St Ives Festival, one of our volunteers, Ethan Carney, gave a stimulating talk on St Ives artist Alfred Wallis to a large turn out at Porthmeor Studios. The audience were totally engaged in Ethan’s narrative and enjoyed a number of fascinating images. Many questions were asked at the end, and the Archive’s book Alfred Wallis & His Family Fact and Fiction is available from our website shop here.
Two more talks are coming up during the Festival, one on Troika and one on Wilhelmina Barns-Graham. Please visit the links for more information and how to book your ticket.
See below for The St Ives Times & Echo‘s recap of the celebratory Tea & Trains event at Tregenna Castle on the 6th September.
St Ives Archive would like to thank all who supported us at the event, especially Richard Long and Tregenna Castle Resort for its generosity in creating this important fundraiser for us.
Look out for more of the resort’s 250-year celebration initiatives.