Punk Archiving: Queering Norfolk and Fighting Power
Punk Archiving: Queering Norfolk and Fighting Power
Adam Baker
What do a lesbian Quaker abolitionist, a queer scientist-filmmaker, and England’s only gay professional football player all have in common? Anna Gurney, one of the ‘cottage ladies’ who fought for the abolition of slavery, Marietta Pallis, whose experiments proved the Norfolk broads were man-made, and Justin Fashanu, the first and only out gay Premier League footballer—all exist within the Queer Norfolk Archive.
Separated by time and circumstance, their histories have been scattered across archives, museums, and even the Norfolk landscape itself. Yet the institutions trusted to house these stories have long obscured them from view—whether by accident or design. Our queer forebears deserve better. Queer history isn’t just something to be studied; it is something to be lived.
Three years ago, I built a tiny team of volunteers dedicated to digitally archiving our county’s LGBTQ+ past. Our mission since then has been simple: find documents, objects, paintings, artifacts, photographs, landscapes, archaeology, films—anything that has associations with queerness—and add it to our online archive: queernorfolk.com/archive.
Isolated by its vast coastline, winding rivers, and lack of motorways, Norfolk is often portrayed as a quiet, rural cul-de-sac of a county in England. Its largest city, Norwich, has long been a cultural outlier—a small but vibrant hub of radical thought and rebellion in an otherwise conservative landscape. Yet, as we’ve unpicked the past, we’ve found that queer lives and radical histories are not confined to the city—they are woven throughout the county and embedded in its communities.
Queer Norfolk owes its roots to a radical collecting project started in 2019 by community librarian Jo Foster-Murdoch. Spurred on by the lack of visible LGBTQ+ history, she joined the (now defunct) Queer History Master’s program at Goldsmiths University. For her final dissertation, Jo began by recording oral histories of queer people living in Norfolk. The British Museum’s Desire, Love, Identity travelling exhibition coming to Norwich inspired her to begin collecting objects and ephemera, too. Armed with a pink filing cabinet, she traveled the county, gathering donations from queer people: items ranged from Norwich’s response to the AIDS crisis and 1980s protest banners to Cromer Pride postcards and Drumming the Beating Heart—perhaps the bitchiest zine ever made. She secured a space for the 12 boxes of material she had amassed at the Norfolk Heritage Centre, where it remains today.
In the UK, most archives, museums, and libraries are run by local authorities. For decades, queer voices and stories were largely absent from these institutions due to Section 28—a notorious clause in the 1988 Local Government Act that banned the “promotion” of homosexuality by local authorities. This law created a climate of fear and avoidance, where institutions often refused to engage with queer communities—driven not only by legal concerns but also by underlying personal or institutional prejudice. The act had one exemption, however: health promotion. While appearing outwardly beneficial, this exception often reinforced medicalized viewpoints that framed gay men primarily as vectors of disease. As a result, what has ended up in public archives tends to overlook the cultural richness of the LGBTQ+ community, effectively sanitizing queer identity in favor of a narrow, clinical narrative. Today, this means that while Section 28 was repealed in 2003, its legacy lingers. Jo’s project is part of a slow but vital process of repair. Still, many institutions remain underfunded and understaffed, lacking the resources to recover what’s been lost.
I revisited Jo’s work in 2022, offering to catalogue the steadily growing collection with the hope of making it more visible through Picture Norfolk, an online repository of images from Norfolk’s past. The repository's policy, which allowed uploaded content to be sold, made it unsuitable for sharing queer archive images, as only fully copyright-free materials were allowed—limiting access and reinforcing the commodification of queer history. The solution? Go rogue.
Sharing objects from this collection on Instagram, under @queernorfolk, I began to bring objects from the Heritage Centre to a Norfolk-wide audience. But Instagram has its drawbacks: its walled garden is only accessible to those with Meta accounts, and its systems for tagging and searching are poor. Realizing I needed more freedom, I decided to create an open, searchable, independent digital resource. I fell in love with eHive—an affordable web-based system for creating digital archives—and, soon after, the website was born.
Our archive is not like other archives. We don’t own the objects we document. Instead, we map queer heritage across private and public collections, linking scattered histories into a single, searchable digital resource. This has only been made possible through the recent slew of affordable, digital archiving tools that pack enough punch and functionality to make them usable and useful to the non-nerdy-archivist type.
Queer Norfolk is first and foremost a punk archive. And if that term sounds made up, that’s because it is. I bastardized this term from the concept of ‘punk archaeology’, first used by Caraher, Kourelis, and Reinhard to describe the fusion of punk sensibilities with the process of community archaeology. Applied to archiving, it means working quickly, creatively, and without institutional red tape. It means a DIY ethos, a focus on place, abundant spontaneity and, crucially, accessible digital tools.
In that spirit, we built a functional, searchable digital archive in under six months. Our community map? Launched in a day. Speed and accessibility took precedence over perfection—refinement came later. Punk has always been about rejecting authority and taking action where institutions either can’t or won’t. I’d learnt from working in Heritage that institutions are often inherently resistant to change, and move at a glacial pace. At one institution, I was told that we couldn’t use LGBT as a tag as it wasn’t in the archive’s standardized term list, which was developed in the 1980s and had barely been updated since.
The punk archiving approach embraces rapid execution, mirroring the grassroots punk movements of the 1970s and DIY activism that has defined queer history for decades. If we want our stories to be seen, we can’t wait for institutions to catch up—which is why the digital medium holds so much appeal. Outside of institutions, we can set our own rules, terms, and standards. If we need to create a new category or define a new term, we can just do it; the only permission we need is our own.
Perhaps this is the defining trait of punk archiving: a rejection of bureaucracy in favor of direct action. By working digitally, outside institutional constraints, Queer Norfolk remains grassroots-led, prioritizing accessibility, immediacy, and community ownership of history. This independence ensures that queer narratives can be presented on our terms. Queer history is so often overlooked, sanitized or erased. Even among our closest allies, complaints from a few disgruntled strangers on X (or worse, MumsNet) or an offhand comment made to gallery staff has been enough to get displays taken down, posters removed, content changed, or events cancelled, thus silencing queer voices.
As a trained historian and former archive worker, I’ve learned the power of heritage. For centuries, institutions have presented themselves as neutral custodians of history, carefully curating what is remembered and what is left to fade. But history has never been neutral. It has always been about power—who gets to decide what is important, and who is erased. What is contained within the archive and the museum is the truth. This truth is our reality. If you are not there, you cease to be real.
And so, queer people have been erased. Institutions have ignored our stories, buried them, or labeled them anomalies. But we have always been here. Once we started opening the drawers, busting down the doors, and clearing away the dust, we found queer history everywhere.
If queer history had always been visible, if our existence had been woven into the national narrative, would it have been as easy to suppress us? To criminalize us? To paint us as something new, unnatural? Most institutions operate under a cis-heteronormative framework, treating everything as straight until proven otherwise. They demand a smoking gun to prove queerness. Unless actively challenged, this default erases queer history.
Digital tools enable us to escape the corridors of power and transcend the closed stacks of traditional archives; online spaces can bring queer visibility instantly into the palms of millions.
While we remain committed to a decentralized approach, the reality is that institutions will have to play a crucial role in preserving Norfolk’s queer history both now and in future. Since we lack the means to store physical collections ourselves, working strategically with these spaces is necessary to ensure vital materials (including some of national significance) are not lost.
This is a difficult position to be in. The project started as a way of breaking free of constraints, but the weight and pull of these institutions is hard to truly break free from. Not only does material rest in their hands, but legitimacy, too. To access these resources, we must engage, even when doing so is challenging.
Queer Norfolk has demonstrated that local institutions, while often slow to change, are not entirely immovable. Collaborations, such as our work with Cromer Museum, have shown that grassroots queer history can find a home within these institutions, and that small but meaningful shifts are possible with the right allies. Supportive staff within these spaces often share our frustrations with the institutions they work for, and even when met with resistance from above, continue to advocate for our community approaches. They provide us with the space, materials and resources we need; they embrace punk and admire the rogue approach we stand for.
Still, the burden remains on queer people to do the heavy lifting. Queer Norfolk is driving change independently, from the outside. While any impact we make within institutions reflects our determination, it also depends just as much on the willingness (and sometimes the whims) of those institutions to let it happen. This is why for our project, digital will always be king, giving us unlimited space and scope to platform queer voices and stories when others will not.
One of the biggest lessons from Queer Norfolk is that change doesn’t have to (and rarely) comes from within institutions. We’re often told to seek "a seat at the table," but we don’t have to accept it on the terms offered. Instead of waiting for institutions to open their doors, we can build our own spaces—our own punk projects—working alongside traditional archives but refusing to be limited by them.
Queer Norfolk has taught us that history is not just something to be archived. It is something to be challenged, rewritten, and lived—by those who refuse to be erased.
Separated by time and circumstance, their histories have been scattered across archives, museums, and even the Norfolk landscape itself. Yet the institutions trusted to house these stories have long obscured them from view—whether by accident or design. Our queer forebears deserve better. Queer history isn’t just something to be studied; it is something to be lived.
Three years ago, I built a tiny team of volunteers dedicated to digitally archiving our county’s LGBTQ+ past. Our mission since then has been simple: find documents, objects, paintings, artifacts, photographs, landscapes, archaeology, films—anything that has associations with queerness—and add it to our online archive: queernorfolk.com/archive.
Radical Origins
Isolated by its vast coastline, winding rivers, and lack of motorways, Norfolk is often portrayed as a quiet, rural cul-de-sac of a county in England. Its largest city, Norwich, has long been a cultural outlier—a small but vibrant hub of radical thought and rebellion in an otherwise conservative landscape. Yet, as we’ve unpicked the past, we’ve found that queer lives and radical histories are not confined to the city—they are woven throughout the county and embedded in its communities.
Queer Norfolk owes its roots to a radical collecting project started in 2019 by community librarian Jo Foster-Murdoch. Spurred on by the lack of visible LGBTQ+ history, she joined the (now defunct) Queer History Master’s program at Goldsmiths University. For her final dissertation, Jo began by recording oral histories of queer people living in Norfolk. The British Museum’s Desire, Love, Identity travelling exhibition coming to Norwich inspired her to begin collecting objects and ephemera, too. Armed with a pink filing cabinet, she traveled the county, gathering donations from queer people: items ranged from Norwich’s response to the AIDS crisis and 1980s protest banners to Cromer Pride postcards and Drumming the Beating Heart—perhaps the bitchiest zine ever made. She secured a space for the 12 boxes of material she had amassed at the Norfolk Heritage Centre, where it remains today.
In the UK, most archives, museums, and libraries are run by local authorities. For decades, queer voices and stories were largely absent from these institutions due to Section 28—a notorious clause in the 1988 Local Government Act that banned the “promotion” of homosexuality by local authorities. This law created a climate of fear and avoidance, where institutions often refused to engage with queer communities—driven not only by legal concerns but also by underlying personal or institutional prejudice. The act had one exemption, however: health promotion. While appearing outwardly beneficial, this exception often reinforced medicalized viewpoints that framed gay men primarily as vectors of disease. As a result, what has ended up in public archives tends to overlook the cultural richness of the LGBTQ+ community, effectively sanitizing queer identity in favor of a narrow, clinical narrative. Today, this means that while Section 28 was repealed in 2003, its legacy lingers. Jo’s project is part of a slow but vital process of repair. Still, many institutions remain underfunded and understaffed, lacking the resources to recover what’s been lost.
I revisited Jo’s work in 2022, offering to catalogue the steadily growing collection with the hope of making it more visible through Picture Norfolk, an online repository of images from Norfolk’s past. The repository's policy, which allowed uploaded content to be sold, made it unsuitable for sharing queer archive images, as only fully copyright-free materials were allowed—limiting access and reinforcing the commodification of queer history. The solution? Go rogue.
Sharing objects from this collection on Instagram, under @queernorfolk, I began to bring objects from the Heritage Centre to a Norfolk-wide audience. But Instagram has its drawbacks: its walled garden is only accessible to those with Meta accounts, and its systems for tagging and searching are poor. Realizing I needed more freedom, I decided to create an open, searchable, independent digital resource. I fell in love with eHive—an affordable web-based system for creating digital archives—and, soon after, the website was born.
Our archive is not like other archives. We don’t own the objects we document. Instead, we map queer heritage across private and public collections, linking scattered histories into a single, searchable digital resource. This has only been made possible through the recent slew of affordable, digital archiving tools that pack enough punch and functionality to make them usable and useful to the non-nerdy-archivist type.
Punk Archiving
Queer Norfolk is first and foremost a punk archive. And if that term sounds made up, that’s because it is. I bastardized this term from the concept of ‘punk archaeology’, first used by Caraher, Kourelis, and Reinhard to describe the fusion of punk sensibilities with the process of community archaeology. Applied to archiving, it means working quickly, creatively, and without institutional red tape. It means a DIY ethos, a focus on place, abundant spontaneity and, crucially, accessible digital tools.
“If we want our stories to be seen, we can’t wait for institutions to catch up”
In that spirit, we built a functional, searchable digital archive in under six months. Our community map? Launched in a day. Speed and accessibility took precedence over perfection—refinement came later. Punk has always been about rejecting authority and taking action where institutions either can’t or won’t. I’d learnt from working in Heritage that institutions are often inherently resistant to change, and move at a glacial pace. At one institution, I was told that we couldn’t use LGBT as a tag as it wasn’t in the archive’s standardized term list, which was developed in the 1980s and had barely been updated since.
The punk archiving approach embraces rapid execution, mirroring the grassroots punk movements of the 1970s and DIY activism that has defined queer history for decades. If we want our stories to be seen, we can’t wait for institutions to catch up—which is why the digital medium holds so much appeal. Outside of institutions, we can set our own rules, terms, and standards. If we need to create a new category or define a new term, we can just do it; the only permission we need is our own.
Perhaps this is the defining trait of punk archiving: a rejection of bureaucracy in favor of direct action. By working digitally, outside institutional constraints, Queer Norfolk remains grassroots-led, prioritizing accessibility, immediacy, and community ownership of history. This independence ensures that queer narratives can be presented on our terms. Queer history is so often overlooked, sanitized or erased. Even among our closest allies, complaints from a few disgruntled strangers on X (or worse, MumsNet) or an offhand comment made to gallery staff has been enough to get displays taken down, posters removed, content changed, or events cancelled, thus silencing queer voices.
We Have Always Been Here
As a trained historian and former archive worker, I’ve learned the power of heritage. For centuries, institutions have presented themselves as neutral custodians of history, carefully curating what is remembered and what is left to fade. But history has never been neutral. It has always been about power—who gets to decide what is important, and who is erased. What is contained within the archive and the museum is the truth. This truth is our reality. If you are not there, you cease to be real.
And so, queer people have been erased. Institutions have ignored our stories, buried them, or labeled them anomalies. But we have always been here. Once we started opening the drawers, busting down the doors, and clearing away the dust, we found queer history everywhere.
If queer history had always been visible, if our existence had been woven into the national narrative, would it have been as easy to suppress us? To criminalize us? To paint us as something new, unnatural? Most institutions operate under a cis-heteronormative framework, treating everything as straight until proven otherwise. They demand a smoking gun to prove queerness. Unless actively challenged, this default erases queer history.
Digital tools enable us to escape the corridors of power and transcend the closed stacks of traditional archives; online spaces can bring queer visibility instantly into the palms of millions.
A Seat At The Table?
While we remain committed to a decentralized approach, the reality is that institutions will have to play a crucial role in preserving Norfolk’s queer history both now and in future. Since we lack the means to store physical collections ourselves, working strategically with these spaces is necessary to ensure vital materials (including some of national significance) are not lost.
This is a difficult position to be in. The project started as a way of breaking free of constraints, but the weight and pull of these institutions is hard to truly break free from. Not only does material rest in their hands, but legitimacy, too. To access these resources, we must engage, even when doing so is challenging.
Queer Norfolk has demonstrated that local institutions, while often slow to change, are not entirely immovable. Collaborations, such as our work with Cromer Museum, have shown that grassroots queer history can find a home within these institutions, and that small but meaningful shifts are possible with the right allies. Supportive staff within these spaces often share our frustrations with the institutions they work for, and even when met with resistance from above, continue to advocate for our community approaches. They provide us with the space, materials and resources we need; they embrace punk and admire the rogue approach we stand for.
“We’re often told to seek "a seat at the table," but we don’t have to accept it on the terms offered.”
Still, the burden remains on queer people to do the heavy lifting. Queer Norfolk is driving change independently, from the outside. While any impact we make within institutions reflects our determination, it also depends just as much on the willingness (and sometimes the whims) of those institutions to let it happen. This is why for our project, digital will always be king, giving us unlimited space and scope to platform queer voices and stories when others will not.
One of the biggest lessons from Queer Norfolk is that change doesn’t have to (and rarely) comes from within institutions. We’re often told to seek "a seat at the table," but we don’t have to accept it on the terms offered. Instead of waiting for institutions to open their doors, we can build our own spaces—our own punk projects—working alongside traditional archives but refusing to be limited by them.
Queer Norfolk has taught us that history is not just something to be archived. It is something to be challenged, rewritten, and lived—by those who refuse to be erased.