Established in 2012, the National Museum of Roller Derby (NMRD) is the UK’s first permanent collection of ephemera and memorabilia relating to the sport of Women’s Flat Track Roller Derby. In 2016, to celebrate our new permanent home in Glasgow Women’s Library’s new Bridgeton HQ, we bring you an ‘Object of the Month’ from our ever expanding collections.
We want your old team shirts, flyers, zines and other paraphernalia to illustrate the remarkable development of the sport in the UK. Keep an eye on the Facebook page for future announcements on how to donate items to the Museum.
*Due to the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown restrictions access to the collection, and consequently digitisation of the collection, is limited. Therefore, Object of the Month will become Sticker of the Month as these objects are already digitised online*
January 2022
It’s the beginning of a new year and, here at GWL, we hope to fill this 365 page book that is called 2022 with exciting new projects and we aim to share as much history with you as possible.
Roller Derby is a much loved sport across the world. Starting in Chicago, U.S.A., the sport eventually found its way across to Europe with the U.K. seeing the emergence of roller derby leagues and teams sprouting up across the country. Glasgow Roller Derby, GRD (previously known as Glasgow Roller Girls, GRG), became the first Scottish team to emerge and the fourth British team after London Roller Girls, London Rockin’ Rollers, and the Birmingham Blitz Dames.
Roller Derby is truly the epitome of a grassroots and volunteer led sport and a lot of passion and drive is instilled into the bouts and competitions. Often, players can assume an alter-ego or pseudonym character to play under, akin to the sport of wrestling. Players can illustrate movements and groups that they support and put their personalities on display and one way of doing this is to decorate their helmets with stickers. Above we see a sticker which states, “WE LOVE THIS GAME!” In 2022, this series of Object of the Month will delve deeply into stickers and how they are utilised in the sport.
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