Archive

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...

New vehicle registration numbers released today. Until 1974 they were issued locally so we regularly enquiries about the original registers. We recently received one relating to a tractor, and is linked to a garage in Evesham called Coulter’s.

It’s one thing to read how things were, or record historic objects and buildings, but it’s quite another to hear people talk about the past and telling their stories. Oral history, recording these personal accounts, is an important part of capturing the past that lies within living memory. A key aim of the Market Gardening...

We recently accepted a deposit of a Court Book covering the Evesham Abbey lands in South, Middle and North Littleton. The item had been for sale at auction and following private purchase and assistance from the Friends of Worcestershire Archives, the book is now here in the archives. As it was sold under the Manorial...

  Driving over the bridge into Evesham you pass asparagus fields – a small remnant of the market gardening industry that thrived in the Vale of Evesham until the mid-20th century. A new project exploring and celebrating the market gardening heritage in the Vale is now underway and looking for volunteers. The key focus of...

How a chance find in the archives inspired research into a Worcestershire Resident and Midlands MP, with international consequences. In May 1972 the British Library of Political and Economic Science undertook a survey of the personal papers of politicians of the Twentieth Century. One of the people contacted regarding their parliamentary career, was retired MP...

  A new two year project focussing on the market gardening heritage in the Vale of Evesham has just been awarded £68,700 by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) and £5000 from Historic England. The project is being run by Worcestershire Archive & Archaeology Service (WAAS), in partnership with Cleeve Prior Heritage Trust, Vale Landscape Heritage...

  Stone structures are a tangible example of archaeology, often easy to see and appreciate. Being visible doesn’t make them any easier for the archaeologist to understand though. A lot of the time, when people see archaeological sites it can be difficult to grasp what  is going on. Archaeologists’ focus on what we call ‘features’,...

  A medieval cooking pot – not the prettiest, but the source of fascinating information none the less. Our January Find of the Month gives us an insight into the lives and eating habits of ordinary medieval people, and how these changed over time. This particular pot fragment, or sherd, is unusually large and helpfully...

A well preserved section of Evesham Abbey’s outer precinct wall was uncovered recently. Late March saw one of our archaeologists, Jamie Wilkins, carrying out a Watching Brief[1] at the former Vauxhall Inn on Merstow Green, Evesham.  The work, which was undertaken on behalf of Alan McColm and APU Retail Ltd, revealed a well-preserved section of...