Tara GreavesFrom a little girl with a daisy chain around her neck to a young boy dressed as a clown, Norfolk schoolchildren got to see what their counterparts from the Victorian era looked like yesterday at the start of a three-month exhibition.Tara Greaves

From a little girl with a daisy chain around her neck to a young boy dressed as a clown, Norfolk schoolchildren got to see what their counterparts from the Victorian era looked like yesterday at the start of a three-month exhibition.

With photographs, documents and even video, the exhibition - a joint project between the Norfolk Record Office and the East Anglian Film Archive - is aimed at giving children an understanding of what life was like for youngsters from the 1860s up to the first world war.

Children from Hockering Primary School, who were sent a pack with images, records and a DVD, helped to officially launch the exhibition and also had some of their work featured.

Victoria Horth, Norwich Record Office archive education and outreach officer, said: 'We were inspired by archive footage of children being filmed outside a cinema who then went inside to see themselves on the big screen.

'A lot of the archive photographs we found were posed with a toy or standing by a chair and there were not many informal ones. There was a little girl outside with a daisy chain around her neck. We have some very smartly dressed children and then a photograph from the Rows in Yarmouth, and the majority of people who lived there were very poor.'

Children from Hockering and West Walton Primary School, produced letters, stained with tea to make them look authentic, and art work.

The exhibition in the Long Gallery at the Archive Centre, next to County Hall, is open Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays from 9am to 5pm, Tuesdays 9.30am to 5pm and Saturday 9am to noon until August 28; www.archives.norfolk.gov.uk