Tideswell Trail Re-used

The 2011 Tideswell Trails Hidden Histories self-guided leaflet used in Tideswell Church by local artist John Firth. He is using the map to locate his drawings of local places, asking people to guess the locations.

Hope - Castleton Finds Day

Today was another successful finds day for the Hope and Castleton Lives of the Medieval Common People project.

Ninety people came to see the finds from 50 test pits dug in the Derbyshire villages in 2012.

Cottingham Training

One Mark Kirby Scholar talks about Cottingham's past

Today we began work with Cottingham Parish Council on a series of workshops exploring the 18th Century history of the village, which lies on the outskirts of Hull. Over the next.three months we will deliver four workshtoops linking archival sources, archaeology and hands-on activities to discover childhood, costume, food and farming 300 years ago.

Today was about introducing the project to participants and training them in heritage interpretation and digital media. We have set up Wordpress, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts for volunteers to record the workshops. They will also produce an exhibition for Cottingham Day in July.

Follow their progress at cottinghamstory.wordpress.com and on Twitter @CottinghamStory.

Walkley History update

Great night with the Walkley historians last night. Seventeen people gathered around tables in Walkley Community Centre with maps, documents and photos to decide who is going to research what from the lives of WW1 soldiers through the early years of Walkley Reform Club to post-war life, slum clearance and the Walkley Action Group campaign.

Then, we followed the historian session with the second of two oral history training workshops at the Centre. There are now 21 trained oral historians ready to hit the streets of Walkley to discover its remembered past! Some will begin recording family, friends and neghbours. We also have about 30 people who have been in touch asking to be recorded.

Today, we spent an hour with Veronica Hardstaff in Ruskin Park, identifying which demolished streets local school children will mark out across the park for the Walkley Festival’s Ruskin Park Fun Day on the 6th July. The even numbers of Harworth Steet are definitely on to do, including the club at the corner with Daniel Hill St.

Some of the stalls will be in people’s houses, hopefully the beer tent in a back garden and the stage in the club.

We will write potted biographies of families from as many demolished homes as we can, with names and occupations, display photos and produce a discovery trail for families.

Princes of Gwynedd

We are happy to announce inHeritage are working on the Princes of Gwynedd project.

We are writing website text for 30 sites in north Wales as well as pages on ten key figures in the history of the region during the Medieval period.

The aim is to encourage visitors to explore the sites, discover key features and connect different places to make itineraries.

We will be visiting as many of the sites as possible in late February before drafting texts during early March.

Walkley Ways, Walkley Wars Launch

 The Walkley Ways, Walkley Wars history project was launched with a bang at the Walkley Community Centre, Sheffield on Friday evening.


Almost 100 people packed out the Centre for two hours. It is great to see so much interest in Walkley’s history from such a wide range of ages and parts of the community. Bill introduced the project and two key players in the 1960s/70s slum clearance and improvements scheme gave talks - Geoff Green of the Walkley Action Campaign and Narendra Bajaria, a former planning officer with Sheffield City Council. There were exhibitions of the slum clearance plans, photographs of Walkley in the 1970s and of the memorial windows to the men of the Walkley Reform Club who died in the First World War.

There was a real buzz of excitement in the room, with almost half of the participants having lived in Walkley from before the 1960s, many either moving as their houses were demolished during slum clearance or still living in houses saved from demolition. The participants formed a cross-section of 21st century Walkley society, from teenagers to people in their 80s, and people born and bred in Walkley to more recent arrivals. Thirty-five people signed-up to take part in the research and exploration of Walkley's past over the next three years.

First World War memorial to F. Hartley of the Walkley Reform Club and Sheffield Pals.

 The project will:

1) Research the lives of Walkley people before they went to fight in World War 1 and preserve the memorials of fallen members of the Walkley Liberal Reform Club.

2) Explore the council plans to demolish Walkley in the 1960s and 70s.

3) Catalogue, research and make public the Walkley Action Group archive in the Walkley Commnunity Centre.

4) Record memories of Walkley life during the 1960s and 70s.

5) Find out what Fir St was like in 1908/09 when the Walkley Liberal Reform Club was proposed and built.

South Road, 1978

The project will train volunteers in local history and oral history who will participate in much of the exciting research.

A steering group comprising Rick Allen and Nicole Houghton (WCC), Bill Bevan, Rev Melanie FitzGerald, Veronica Hardstaff and Hugh Waterhouse will oversee the project on behalf of WCC.
We hope the project will lead to the establishment of a Walkley History Society, who will use the Community Centre as its base.

The project is funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and is being managed by inHeritage on behalf of the Walkley Community Centre.


You can view Bill’s introduction to the project, presented to the project launch as a video on YouTube.

http://youtu.be/SUoi6t_uDZQ

November Round-Up

November has been a busy month for inHeritage! We've barely had time to draw breath.

We have been appointed to the new Walkley Ways, Walkley Wars heritage project by Walkley Community Centre, providing project management, oral history mentoring, design and interpretation on a three year community heritage project.

The final self-guided trails for the Hunter Archaeological Society's  centenary have been produced as leaflets and audio tours.

We have been appointed to work on a project in Cottingham, East Yorkshire, to help develop a series of heritage workshops around the theme of the Mark Kirby Free School, which celebrates the 300th anniversary of Kirby's endowment this year. The workshops cover aspects of life in the village in the early 1700s, including childhood, costume, food and the landscape.

We have begun work on interpretation of the Grenoside Reading Room, Sheffield, to coincide with the refurbishment of the room as a community events and arts centre.

Tideswell Tales has been continuining apace with planning work beginning in earnest on the community performance. This will take material from the oral history work to create a series of free-flowing promenade performances throughout the village in Wakes Week next year.

The report writing phase of the Castleton and Hope Lives of the Medieval Common People project is now underway, especially for the documentary research and archaeology test pits.