In 1997, the Arts Council of Great Britain publicised a scheme called Arts 4 Everyone, funded by the UK National Lottery. This scheme offered grants of up to £5,000 to finance suitable projects by small special interest groups.

The Lowestoft Photographic Society (now the Lowestoft Photographic & Digital Imaging Club) successfully put forward a very detailed and carefully-costed proposal for a photographic project called 'Lowestoft Towards The Millennium'. This resulted in a grant of over £4,000 from the Arts Council and a supporting grant from the local authority, Waveney District Council.

A management group was formed within the Society and work on the project began in autumn 1997. The published aims of the project were:

1. To create an archive of photographic material in the form of monochrome and colour prints and slides recording Lowestoft, the town, its people and activities, as it approached the millennium.

2. To include aspects of daily life and work, industry, transportation, tourism, architecture, religion, education, the arts, sport and recreation.

3. To mount a public exhibition of photographic prints and slides and to donate the prints to Waveney District Council for archive purposes.

This would provide a specific and clearly defined context for the creative photographic skills of members of the Society. It would also foster the development of new skills in research, planning and group work, and would emphasise the need to set and meet the very highest standards of design and execution required for public exhibition and archive purposes.

The management of the project over the next 12 months to completion was often quite difficult but it was generally agreed at the end that we had fulfilled the aims and achieved a very rewarding outcome.

At the exhibition, held at the Lowestoft Central Library between October 11th and 17th 1998, 118 dry mounted and encapsulated monochrome prints were put on display for the general public.

Note: A small selection of the Millennium Project images can be viewed by clicking the thumbnails shown to the right.

Approximately 2,500 black and white negatives had been processed from the work of 28 members of Lowestoft Photographic Society and 5 members of Lowestoft Camera Club.

The Chairman of Waveney District Council formally received the prints for the Suffolk Archive where they now form part of the historical record available to future historians. In doing so, he congratulated the Society on the very high quality of the prints displayed and paid tribute to the tremendous amount of hard work put into the planning and execution of this highly successful project.

[Thanks to Alan Hale, LPC]