Archive

Stolen ducks, theft of acorns and disputes between parishes are some of the fascinating stories contained with Quarter Sessions. This is the latest in our Exploring Archives series, on Wed 20 June, helping you to discover more about some of the historical sources and how they can help you. You may never have heard of Quarter...

You may have heard in the media the news that the Elgar Archive, currently at the Elgar Birthplace Museum, is to move to the British Library in London. We wanted to let you know what is happening and our role in this. Over the past two years the Elgar Foundation has been considering a new...

As Volunteers' Week draws to a close, here's an account of one of our young volunteer's work on our upcoming Ice Age exhibitions

Mammoths in Staffordshire? Yes! A mammoth bone was recently discovered along the River Tame in Staffordshire. Megafauna remains are incredibly important for understanding deep history and past landscapes, but they’re more common in the West Midlands than you’d think. Most archaeology occurs within the first metre or so below ground, except for traces of Ice...

This is the fourth in a series of blog posts celebrating the life and work of timber-frame building specialists FWB ‘Freddie’ and Mary Charles. Funded by Historic England, the ‘Charles Archive’ project aims to digitise and make more accessible the Charles collection. In this piece we will be looking at a building (or part-building) that...

Our archives contain over 12 miles of shelving with thousands of boxes. These boxes contain all sorts of stories, and can be the inspiration for all sorts of creative writing. Various films, TV dramas, books and plays have used archives and the stories they contain as their basis, and we are keen to encourage people...

In 1990, the Worcestershire Record Office began offering an in-house microfilming service to those individuals and organisations wishing to have surrogates of archive materials in filmic form. Not only did this improve the accessibility of those archives, it also helped to preserve the original material. As the decade moved on and the photographic world became...

Another four test pits were recently excavated in the small Worcestershire village of White Ladies Aston, as part of the HLF funded Small Pits, Big Ideas project we’re running on behalf of Worcestershire Archaeological Society. So, what did we find this time? As with those dug last autumn, all test pits were excavated by Looked...

  Roman street food? Perhaps. We’ve been experimenting with a reconstruction of an unusual oven found during The Hive excavation to see how and what the people of Worcester ate in Roman times. Before The Hive was built, an extensive excavation took place. Fragments from a number of unusual prefabricated Roman ovens were found, one...

Forthcoming Events We have a range of events coming up, including as part of the Lost Landscapes project, many of which have been arranged since our events leaflet came out in January. WWI Talk Thu 17 May 6-8pm Dr Adrian Gregson, our Collections Manager, will talk about his new book about a territorial battalion during...