Latest news

  • 14th March 2024
The Bailey Bridge

Hailed as a key invention to come out of World War II, Bailey bridges allowed waterways and steep drops to be crossed quickly and easily. Have you spotted any around Worcestershire? Help us record these often overlooked heritage sites. Named after the engineer and civil servant Donald Bailey, the Bailey Bridge was a prefabricated, modular...

  • 11th March 2024
Redditch New Town Archives: Sports, Promotion and Leisure

Within one of our large Commission for the New Town collections, there are c9500 photographs, reports and other items from the Development Corporation Technical Library. We just love showing them to you on our social media platforms. They bring the Redditch New Town collections to life, and capture the design characteristics of the period. One...

  • 6th March 2024
Travels in Time and through Space with Arthur Henry Whinfield

One of the great things about my job as an Archives Assistant is that I get to review a wide range of collections, whether it’s to assist researchers in the Searchroom, to undertake cataloguing and support digital preservation or deliver physical outreach and online campaigns such as Explore Your Archive. Recently I was given the...

  • 27th February 2024
Redditch New Town Archives: Industry and Employment

Attracting Industry Part of the Master Plan was to attract a variety of industry to the town. The set-up of large factories were negotiated together with land, and allocation of new houses to key workers. BKL Alloys is an example of this, a firm that moved one of it’s divisions from Birmingham. As a result,...

  • 20th February 2024
Redditch New Town Archives: Planning & Design

Planning for a New Town Unlike most other New Towns, Redditch had a rich history, dating from the year 1140 when Cistercian monks founded Bordesley Abbey in the Arrow Valley, through to its more recent industries in needle-making, fish-hooks and motorcycle production. Redditch Development Corporation therefore  had a slightly different task to most. They had...

  • 18th December 2023
A life lived in spiritual devotion: Frances Ridley Havergal, Part Two

More from the recently catalogued deposit highlights Havergal’s impressive body of work, despite a life cut short. If you missed Part One, find it here.  ‘Writing is praying with me: for I never seem to write even a verse by myself’, said Frances Ridley Havergal. This is perhaps unsurprising given the English religious poet and...

  • 11th December 2023
A life lived in spiritual devotion: Frances Ridley Havergal, Part One

Recently catalogued deposits of books, family sketchbooks, music, testimonials and presentation volumes, as well as biographical texts, shed light on the English religious poet and hymnwriter, and her remarkable family. Born on 14th December 1836, Frances Ridley Havergal was raised in the Victorian English vicarage of Astley, Worcestershire. The youngest child of Reverend William Henry...

  • 18th September 2023
Protecting Feckenham’s moated manor site

Feckenham Manorial Moated Site is a nationally significant scheduled monument. Despite this, it has been on an ‘at risk’ heritage register – until now, that is. Owned and managed by Redditch Borough Council, it is also a key green and recreational space within the heart of Feckenham village, and the focus of a community group’s...

  • 8th September 2023
Researching Your Worcestershire Family History is Now even Easier

People researching their family history now have access to more than two million records detailing baptisms, marriages, and burials in the county. Over five centuries worth of records have been released online thanks to a new partnership between Worcestershire County Council’s Archive and Archaeology Service and Ancestry, the largest UK Family History Site. The records,...

  • 7th September 2023
Photographing Worcestershire

Photographs offer a visual record of the history of the past. Seeing what people, places and communities once looked like can help us trace changes overtime. They can even reveal the history of the photographic medium itself. At Worcestershire Archive Service, we hold 80,020 photos as part of the Worcestershire Photographic Survey – a collection...