Guest Blog: Victoria Iglikowski On Immersive Experience SUFFRAGETTE CITY

Victoria Iglikowski is the Principal Records Specialist - Diverse Histories at The National Archives

I have spent the past year working at The National Archives on our women's suffrage collections, to try and exploit the great potential of the records and share them with the widest audiences possible.

Our collections on the movement for women's suffrage are world renowned and demonstrate the huge impact, particularly the militant suffrage campaigns, had on the Government, as well as the thousands of men and women who fought for the vote.

Suffragette City, in collaboration with the National Trust, has been a great way of doing this: taking the rich archival collections and bringing them to live by re-creating spaces that are so pertinent to the women's suffrage movement. The National Archives records have very directly influenced every stage of the re-creation, from the immersive set designs to the actors who powerfully animate the spaces.

This experience follows a mission-based model, where the audience faces the stark choices made by ordinary women and men in their campaign for equal suffrage. Multiple actors animate the space, as directly inspired by surviving archival testimonies of individuals involved in the movement.

The actors represent historical figures from a from a variety of backgrounds, including working-class women in the suffrage movement and police officers who left testimonies of their participation in these struggles.

With multiple colleagues, I scoped the key suffrage locations in London, where the heart of the militant suffrage campaigns had been run from. One of the most striking locations was the bustling headquarters of the movement, first based at Clements Inn, and then Lincolns Inn House. This acted as the WSPU's main offices, where everything from finances to communications and the production of propaganda material was managed.

The police regularly raided these headquarters as part of their surveillance and investigation of the suffragettes, and the documents seized in these raids leave a great legacy of information about the movement.

The experience re-creates these lively headquarters with office work, such administering hunger strike rewards and engaging in self-defence classes - brought to life with actors throughout the space. Inspired by archival photographs, portraits of key figureheads in the organisation adorn the walls, copies of The Suffragette can be found, and an office desk similar to General Manger Harriet Kerr's.

Through scoping the records, it became clear early on that multiple spaces would be much more effective to tell the rich suffrage stories held in our archives.

The re-creation of multiple spaces made this a much more ambitious project. The creative process and research built up over a number of months to identify the strongest stories in the records, the best spaces to re-create and the most powerful locations through which to bring them to life.

The result is the powerful re-creation of a number of key places important to the story of the movement, including the WSPU's Headquarters, a tea room and a police cell. In the prison cell the actors directly use archival recreations to enforce the messages of the risks involved, including showing force-feeding forms.

The key narrative of the project is driven by The National Archives' records on the suffrage experiences of Lillian Ball, a dressmaker and mother from Tooting, arrested for smashing a window in 1912. As a working woman, with a four-year-old child, Lillian faced very difficult choices in being involved in the movement. Your journey will replicate Lillian's, but with your own decisions dictating your fate.

Join me at Suffragette City, to experience what it was really like to be a Suffragette campaigner, as authentically driven by original suffrage records from the era.

Suffragette City runs at the London Pavilion, Piccadilly Circus, until 25 March

Photo credit: Oskar Proctor

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