COVID collecting

The period of lockdown has been many things to many people. Rules and regulations changed everyone’s lives and ‘normal’ became a thing of the past. To complement the official records of this period which will one day exist in our NHS Forth Valley Archive and the University’s own archive, we asked residents of Forth Valley and staff and students at the University to send us images that illustrate the reality of this period for them. Future generations will want to know how the restrictions affected the lives of ordinary people and we have gathered both images of how these restrictions manifested themselves in our local communities – with signs, posters, 2m markers, social distanced queueing, no soap at the supermarket and altered bus timetables – and how the community chose to personally respond to a difficult and frustrating time where many were isolated from loved ones – with the ubiquitous rainbows in windows, shared pom pom trees and fairy walks – this is how the University of Stirling and the wider Forth Valley coped with and responded to coronavirus.

We are still accepting images into this collection. Please donate your images here.

If your images contain recognisable people, please make sure that they are happy to be captured in such a way and happy for their image to be represented in the archive. We imagine that most of our submissions will take the form of photographs but if you have drawn or painted something which illustrates the above then we would also consider accepting it into the archive.

The Scottish Political Archive is also collecting images from across Scotland recording the current lockdown and welcomes submissions of material from across the country.