The Anchor & Tide Archive

A collection is a network

Anchor & Tide is a community arts charity holding hundreds of oral histories, objects, and photographs gathered from villages across Somerset. The material lived in the links between a voice, an object, a street, and a date — but its old catalogue flattened every one of those relationships into a list.

We designed the archive around three ways in: curated stories, a geographic view, and open exploration through connected records. Each route preserves provenance and makes the path back to the source unmistakable.

Editorial control, durable structure

The team’s curators compose stories from reusable records while keeping the freedom to write around them. A restrained motion language gives transitions a sense of place without slowing down navigation or obscuring focus.

The site is progressively enhanced, readable without JavaScript, and built to remain useful as the collection grows over decades rather than seasons.

A brand the volunteers can use

Alongside the build we gave Anchor & Tide a small identity system — wordmark, palette drawn from the collection’s photography, and a set of templates for exhibition signage and social posts. The guidelines read like a handover to a careful colleague, because that’s exactly who uses them.

Outcome

The public launch connected material that had previously lived across personal drives and physical catalogues. More importantly, contributors gained a process for correcting, contextualising, and extending their own records — and the charity found that visitors now stay to explore rather than dipping in and out.