Archive

While we are all so disconnected from the archives safely stored in the Hive strong rooms, it’s nice to remember some of the beautiful things we hold in the archives.  Some of our most beautiful books have marbled patterns along the edges of pages and on the inside sheets and luckily, one of our archive...

Over the past year we have been helping Creative CoLab with their Heritage at Home project, funded by National Lottery Heritage Fund. Young people have got involved in learning about their own heritage, and finding out about filming and recording oral history. One of the final aspects was to run workshops about creating and caring...

We have a wealth of resources here in our collections to help you research you family, house or local history. Where do you begin discovering how much there is, where it is and what’s online? We have a free 70 page guide which you can download which is the perfect starting point, wherever you are...

Worcestershire archives have been used in a new project looking at 17th and 18th century petitions. It’s great to see our resources used in new ways and contribute to different research projects and we’ve enjoyed hearing about what they’ve been up to and reading some of the stories. ‘The Power of Petitioning in Seventeenth-Century England’...

How the Female Friendly Societies of the 18th and 19th centuries gave women support, friendship and financial security in the hardest of times.   Before the establishment of the welfare state, support for those unable to work was limited; you could turn to the workhouse, poor relief or charity, but for many the answer was...

In The Hive atrium are four large mosaics of photos, with faces made up of hundreds of photos. Moving to The City is a 2 year arts and archive project working with local community groups. Using the archives as inspiration, and photography as a way to engage and work with people, we explored the idea...

Sophie is a student on the University of Liverpool’s Archive course. She has come to us for a placement, finding out about how we do things as well as carrying out a cataloguing assignment for her course. She’s written this blog about her time here, working on the Sandilands Plan Nursery archives. I had always...

This is the fourth and final of our compilations of the letters of Gunner Bert Clements, which were read by Naomi Taylor as part of the Worcestershire World War One Hundred Project. It meant we were able to share them more easily via social media to a wider audience, and also use them with school...

The 3rd set of letters of Bert Clements letters cover early 1916. Twenty-one letters by Gunner Bert Clements of Kidderminster are here in the archives, providing one man’s perspective on the war. They were read by Naomi Taylor for the Worcestershire World War One Hundred project to make them more accessible, and we are combining...

A journey, this time one of work not leisure is the diary of the voyage from Antwerp to San Francisco and back to England by the sailing ship ‘James Kerr’ between 1901 and 1902 written by W. G. Bennett of Edelston, Battenhall Road, Worcester. This ship was built in 1892 by T. Royden & Sons,...