GOC is the oldest and largest outdoors club in the UK for everyone in the LGBTQI+ community, founded in 1974 – see About us and Our history.

What’s in the Archives? The GOC Archives is collection of accumulated documents produced by the Club and its members during the course of their activities and has been selected for permanent preservation and interest for researchers.

The Archives comes in various formats currently including paperwork, cuttings, magazines, photographs, t-shirts and maps.

What the Archives can do for you? If you need help with writing an historical article about the GOC, the GOC Archivist can direct you to the right part of the archive to aid your research.

To give more accessibility to other organisations, the existing archive is now catalogued to international archival standards.

Material Wanted! The usefulness of the Archives depends on you. There are still some gaps within the archive so if anyone has GOC-related items that could be added to our archive I will be happy to hear from you. These can be from any date up to and including the present day.

So, how can you help? If you think you have anything that you think would be of interest to the Club, in any format, and you would like it included into the collection, please contact the GOC Archivist Simon on [email protected].

When donating items please provide as much information as possible, as this will be helpful when the item is catalogued. Please include, if available: Your name, Name of event, Date of item/event, Location of event and group, Names of anyone taking part (especially for photographs)

The Catalogue

The catalogue is a large index that directs the researcher to relevant original source materials. The following are notes on the archival arrangement of the collection:

• The catalogue follows rules according to ISAD(G) – General International Standard Archival Description – a format approved by the International Council on Archives. This means any future document added to the archive can be collated and catalogued by any trained archivist.
• As the GOC is held by a private repository, there are no predefined conditions or rules for cataloguing so this allowed the archivist a certain amount of freedom to order, arrange and list the collection. However, the principle of original order was followed where possible. For example the albums and folders of cuttings, which although included mixed content, was kept intact and put under the most suitable sub-fonds as individual files. It was considered by the archivist that the most suitable method of arrangement to follow was the Committee structure which, although with some minor changes over the years, has basically remained unaltered throughout the Club’s history.
• The structure is broken down into fonds, a term used for the collection of the organisation itself; sub fonds, the different branches of the organisation, i.e. GOC Committee Members; followed by serieswhich is the grouping of related materials Under each series, the individual items are then listed.
• As a private collection, it is not housed in a public repository, so there is no allocated repository reference from the ARCHON database maintained by The National Archives. However, the reference code GB/GOC/** is used to conform to ISAD(G) and identifies the fonds and in turn the individual items themselves.

View the GOC Archives catalogue online.

Further information can be obtained from the GOC Archivist at [email protected].