Rowan Pritchard, Creative Producer reflects on DELVE and working with young people from Constellations, an LGBTQIA+ youth group who meet weekly in Stockport. Constellations were invited to work with Stockroom on DELVE, to explore Stockport’s LGBT+ heritage as part of Historic England’s History in the Making.
Over the summer, the group worked with Casey Orr and Stockroom to explore the Local Heritage Library and what the ideas of heritage, identity and belonging mean to them.
As part of the project, the young people asked for 35mm cameras to capture and document their own lives and experiences. From moments with friends, to the places and surroundings where they find ‘home’, they offer us glimpses from their own perspectives, creating their own archive of what it means to live, be, and belong in Stockport today.
“Early in our meetings, discussions ranged from the Japanese fashion movement Decora to the fiction podcast The Magnus Archives. The group, which meets each week to socialise, support one another, and enjoy a space where they can be their full selves, felt deeply rooted in the present, discussing their news from the week, the things they were doing and were excited for, their worries about exams, university, and starting new school years.
Throughout the summer, we worked with the ever-fabulous photographer Casey Orr. With Casey, the group took striking portraits, each session arriving with carefully chosen accessories and outfits and purposefully selecting backdrop colours -curating how they wanted to be captured. Through these portraits, Casey captured their vibrance, their personalities, and their power. We curated playlists to listen to as we took pictures: Aida/en singing along to Chappell Roan, and Sparrow queuing Kaleo. The photographs burst with the unspoken strength of youth culture.
This love of music took us down a few different avenues. We looked into the songs written and recorded in Stockport at Strawberry Studios - a rich musical history from 10CC to The Smiths. We explored how music and subculture influenced fashion. We invited young people from across Stockport to be a part of public Saturday Town pop-up photoshoots, capturing the youth culture of young people at the heart of Merseyway Shopping Centre today. Through this process we were drawn to Shirley Baker’s photographs from the 1980s, capturing that same energy, creativity, and spirit then.
Photography ©Nan Levy for the Estate of Shirley Baker, All rights reserved.
It was around this time, after taking the images and exploring some of the interests and topics that felt most important to the young people, that it felt like the right time to start exploring the stories of LGBTQ+ people held in the Stockport Local Heritage Library. In my own life and work, I have often found solace and kinship in archives, people, and histories which gave me a new language and a new way to understand myself. Through archives, I found artists like Claude Cahun and David Wojnarowicz who seemed to see things like I did, differently from those around me. When I set out on this project, I had hoped that the young people might find a similar connection through these collections / records we hold, a sense of belonging, and an LGBTQ+ history they could see themselves reflected in. But as I first flicked through the folder labelled LGBT+ in the Local Heritage Library, upstairs in Stockroom, I realised quickly that this wouldn’t be the case. News clippings stood out against the grey pages.
“A HOMOSEXUAL was strangled after he tried to strip a gay teenager’ - bold, next to a photograph of a man in a gorilla costume captioned ‘Monkey Business!’.
And ‘Don’t ruin your life like I have’ bold, in an article about the rise of HIV and AIDS cases in Stockport in 1989.
These items didn’t speak to the real, vibrant lives of their LGBT ancestors from the past.
We spent some time reclaiming the clippings, creating collages and thinking about what it really means to be remembered. The one page that really stood out was a copy of an image from Stockport Flashback by Chris Hill, captioned ‘Gay Liberation March through Stockport in the early 1980s’. We searched in the faces of the two men captured, looking back at us with smiles, literally from the pages of history, wondering who and what their stories were.
The clippings sat in strange contrast with the packets of prints of images developed from 35mm rolls the young people had been capturing themselves throughout the summer and into the beginning of the new school year. Snapshots of their daily lives, their own queer histories, their friends, the things they cared about, the moments they felt were worth preserving. I wonder how much more we could gain from an archive filled with those moments from the past.
As Saturday Town: Our People went up on the walls of Stockroom in late 2025, alongside the powerful portraits captured by Orr, a wall of the young people’s own photographs invites the audience to experience their histories in the making.
In their own words, the young people described what it means to see their images on the wall, better than I ever could:
“Thank you for - having this opportunity to represent us, a lot of the time, people don’t want us to be seen. They don’t want to humanise us, and this is basically that. It’s showing us as people, and as a community.... We all had a film camera, and we all photographed our lives, and basically what we did. And I like how it’s temporary, like it changes, just like our lives do. So, it changes with us, and I like that... Everyone here, is so special and beautiful. And everyone deserves to be seen like that.” - Luka.
“One thing that I am proud of personally, is that I’ve had the opportunity to take photos I’ve taken myself – many of these reflect the people and values that I hold close to me. But as well as that, these photos all tell a story.” - Rory.
Now, as we make DELVE permanent, and have the opportunity to create a lasting legacy of the DELVE project, it is important that we capture this, and create an opportunity for young queer people from Stockport in the future, to find a resonance and a history they can see themselves represented in.
Through Tim Denton’s beautiful, permanent new installation in the Local Heritage Library, curated and decorated by the Constellation group, we are creating a lasting but still changing legacy of what it means to be an LGBTQ+ young person in Stockport today.”
Written by Rowan Pritchard, 2026
DELVE is funded by Historic England’s History in the Making.
Constellations is a weekly group for LGBTQ+ young people and those questioning their gender or sexuality aged 13-18, who live or spend time in Stockport, Run by The Proud Trust.
The Proud Trust’s top priority is improving the lives of LGBTQ+ young people.
Through our regional youth work and national support services, we empower LGBTQ+ young people and the adults in their lives to create positive change for the future. Our work is building a safer environment for LGBTQ+ young people to thrive and achieve their full potential in all the spaces they exist. We do this because we believe all LGBTQ+ young people deserve to live happy, fulfilling lives.
