Hello Traveller

You’ve just clicked on a bit of history from right here in the City of Chelmsford.

Many people know Chelmsford is the birthplace of radio, it’s where Marconi chose to build his first factory and where ideas and experiments unfolded across the years, but it’s so much more than that, it’s where our future world of communication began.

Over a hundred years before Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Marconi was laying down the foundations of the communication explosion of the 21st century. One of the first truly global figures in modern 

communication, he was the first inventor to not only communicate globally but think globally about communication.

From telegraph to telephone and radio to the world wide web, mobile phones and satelitte navigation, the link between then, now and the future is the development of wireless communication.

Essex Record Office continues to capture and preserve our local histories with written material, historical documents, recordings and interviews. The Essex Record Office is also home to a collection of over 150,000 images that catalogue the places, people, objects and machinery of the Marconi Company. 

Artist, Elaine Tribley, was given access to this collection as part of an Essex 2020 Artist in Residence project with the ERO. Focusing on the photographed objects she produced a series of artworks enlarging and placing them into the landscapes around the Records Office 

adding reflective texts. Elaine says “I not only wanted to bring these objects to our attention, challenging their place, Marconi’s place in our future, but I also wanted to celebrate the fact that this incredible collection of photographic history is right here in our own City”.  Two of these works were chosen to be displayed at Chelmsford’s rail station to coincide with the British Science Festival being held in the City.  

To find out more about the work of the Essex Records Office visit : www.essexrecordoffice.co.uk

The Essex Record Office is based at Wharf Road, Chelmsford, Essex CM2 6YT

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A PDF version of this post is available to download below.