Archive

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...

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,...

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...

If a time traveler in the Vale of Evesham were to go back 100 years or more, he/she could be forgiven for thinking that they had landed in another country. Many areas had their own dialect but that belonging to the Vale seems to have almost died out and could perhaps even be described as...

At this time of year, like many of us I’m sure, I look back and review the year. The best and the worst bits, the excitement and the woe, the good days and the times perhaps you’d rather forget. Whilst this year has been a good one for all sorts of reasons, the hardest event...

We have a wonderful collection which provides a beautiful insight into the working life of Queen Elizabeth II. Collected by Florence Bramford from Newington Green near Upton-upon-Severn who became a ladies’ maid to several ladies-in-waiting to the Queen, the Queen Mother and her sister Princess Margaret. Florence’s archive Florence’s paperwork is now held at the...

As part of our #Archives75 series we look at St Helen's during it's time as our home, as well as looking back at the history of possibly the oldest church in the city.

This week marks the last of my archivist traineeship with Worcestershire Archive & Archaeology Service. For the last nine months, the archive team have taken me on as a Trainee Archivist – training me up in all the key aspects of what makes an archive function, and allowed me to discover why archives function, the...

Adrian Gregson, our current County Archivist, shares his memories as part of our #Archives75 series

As part of the Unlocking The Severn project we helped volunteers investigate different aspects of the River's history through the archives