About This Site

The Willow Community Project was developed within the Music strand of StreetLife York (led by Professor Rachel Cowgill, School of Arts & Creative Technologies) as a Knowledge Exchange/research project focused on a lost venue - a Cantonese restaurant-cum-nightclub in York’s Coney Street which closed in 2015.

Though it elicits mixed opinions, the Willow brings up vivid memories among its devoted frequenters. Working with the Institute for the Public Understanding of the Past , the StreetLife team held Willow Community Meets and conducted oral-history interviews with former Willow punters and employees. Perspectives garnered range mainly across the 1990s to the 2010s, often supplemented with objects, playlists, and memorabilia. The project also took to the archives to find text-based and photographic records of the venue’s origins as a 1930s cafe, then as a Cantonese restaurant with live music and DJ from 1973, and as a nightclub from 2008. Highlights were the student newspapers featuring near-constant advertising and student-authored recommendations. The Willow acquired cult status thanks to the ‘students and regulars only’ door policy, the ‘cheesy’ music, and finally the house-party atmosphere leading to easy conversation and music that was never too loud to talk over.

The Willow Community Digital Archive is a collaboration with Greenstone at the University of Waikato, the AHRC-funded InterMusE project (led from York by Rachel Cowgill) and Our Place project with York Music Venue Network and Swansea University, and ThomFong , a strategy design consultancy co-directed by Vicki Fong. The collaboration explores an innovative approach to viewing archive material that utilises research expertise and user-experience design. Vicki Fong, daughter of the owners of the Willow, designed the iconic graphic identity, which includes the Willow girl and famous ‘Love it or Hate it?’ images many recall when remembering the venue.

The Willow Digital Archive is an archival project which seeks to preserve and document the research done thus far, while also inviting others to contribute their objects and memories. We envision this project to be a growing, collaborative archive with an expanded outreach.