Archive

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...

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...

Parish Registers are a well used part of our collections, perhaps our most commonly used, being a key source of personal details for family historians. Everyday you can see people browsing them on microfilms here in The Hive. However whilst these are important, there is far much more to parish records than just the registers,...

An exhibition is taking place in The Hive café, inspired by the maps in our archives, and created by members of a MapArt Interest Group. It all began last year when artist Rosie McMinn started a group which met in The Hive to create artwork inspired by maps. If you have seen the maps in...

  A unique collection of magic lantern slides are the inspiration for a new art project, we’ve interviewed Rob Hewitt from Redhawk Logistica to find out more… The project is celebrating a unique collection of photographic magic lantern slides taken by a Worcester resident, Arthur Henry Whinfield. He lectured to many local folk about his...

  Saturday 17th February is 1 Day Without Us – a national event to celebrate migration, migrants and the contribution they make to society. Migration is the source of much discussion in the UK at present and, for some, invokes strong opinions. It is sometimes portrayed as a new phenomenon with a clear division between...

  Looking for some tips on the art of romance this Valentine’s Day? It might be worth delving into the medieval best seller and guide to courtly love ‘Le Roman de la Rose’ – The Story of the Rose. Written in rhyming couplets in medieval French it tells the story of a young man’s attempts...

  This is the second in a series of blog posts celebrating the life and work of timber-frame building specialists FWB ‘Freddie’ and Mary Charles.   In this blog article we look at one of the most well-known and significant buildings that Freddie Charles worked on – the Great Barn of Bredon.   Bredon Barn...

We often see a name that sounds unusual and wonder what it means. One of our neighbours in the Butts is The Paul Pry and we have found that this name dates back nearly 200 years. The name Paul Pry derives from the play of the same name, which was written by John Poole and...