The King's England: Nottinghamshire

I spent an industrious few weeks in December scanning a battered copy of The King's England volume on Nottinghamshire edited by Arthur Mee, converting the text to HTML, adding a large number of carefully chosen images (in addition to the ones in the book) and uploading the pages to my Nottinghamshire History website.

Mee's King's England series was an ambitious project to produce guides to the counties of England and 41 volumes were produced. Nottinghamshire: The Midland Stronghold appeared in 1938. Most of the research was undertaken by Mee's sister and her husband and Mee himself had a close connection with the county having been born in Stapleford in 1875.

There is an entry for virtually every town and village in the county and although the focus tends to be on the architecture of the parish church and local notable families or personalities it makes for a fairly interesting read. However, the content has been criticised by the author of the Suffolk Churches website for being 'verbose, sentimental. nationalistic and just plain old-fashioned inaccurate' and warns that if you read other volumes in the series 'after a while all England becomes a blur of romantic twaddle.'

See what you think!

• Arthur Mee's The King's England: Nottinghamshire

New entries on the Nottinghamshire Heritage Gateway website

The latest history research guides to be added to the Nottinghamshire Heritage Gateway website over the last few months include:

• Lord Byron
• Almshouses
• Canals

New entries on the Nottinghamshire Heritage Gateway website

The latest history research guides to be added to the Nottinghamshire Heritage Gateway website over the last few months include:

• The Luddites
• Canals of Nottinghamshire
• The village of Tollerton
• Women's history in Nottingham
• Boots
• John Player & Son
• Raleigh

Hyson Green History

'On the Flats' is a Heritage Lottery-funded project to research the history of the Nottingham suburb of Hyson Green. The project is using oral history interviews and archive-based resources but is also gathering material from former residents to deposit in the archives.

A website (www.hysongreenhistory.org) has been launched and at the end of 2011 the team will produce a booklet and stage an exhibition at Brewhouse Yard on the Hyson Green Flats Story.

The project is looking for ex-residents to interview, anyone who worked in key services connected with the Flats (e.g. health, social work, council officials, police) and any materials and items which have a connection with the Flats.

New Woodborough Heritage website

The Woodborough Heritage website has recently been "overhauled, extended and improved in its presentation and ease of reference."

The website has been reorganised into major themes and now contains an impressive total of 200 articles most of which are illustrated with photographs taken from a database of more than 4,500 images (an example is shown below).

• www.woodborough-heritage.org.uk

"This 1913 photograph shows the Bugle Horn Pub, Old Post office, butchers shop and also the blacksmiths, this really was the centre of the village in 1913 as it is today but without the trades. The only building that has been demolished is the Bugle Horn and that happened in the 1960’s. On the opposite side of the road but out of view is St Swithun's Church. From left to right Mrs. Martha E Foster, with Miss. Gertie Foster and Tommy Burnett RN. Also Mr. Henshaw with his horse and trap, the main lettering on the rear states ”Hygienic Bakery - Lambley”, lettering on the side states P Henshaw. The Foster’s ran the Post Office and the Burnett’s lived for a short time at the Manor House leaving around 1915."