Nottingham Industrial Museum re-opens

The industrial museum, housed in the stables at Wollaton Hall, was closed in 2009 as part of council cost-cutting. However, funding has been found to reopen the attraction and volunteers will run it. It will be open Saturdays, Sundays and bank holidays between 11am and 5pm (4pm in the winter) and there will be a small admission charge.

Members from the Nottingham Arkwright Society are organising monthly events where the steam engines will be in full steam.

• Nottingham Industrial Museum website
• Article in the Nottingham Evening Post
• Further information on the Nottingham City Council website

Open Churches Weekends, July 2012

Churches across Nottinghamshire and the city of Nottingham will be open to visitors over two weekends in July. The special weekends, on the 9th-10th and 16th-17th July, are intended to give people "the chance to discover or rediscover the rich variety of churches we have across the county".

For information on which churches are participating please visit the Southwell & Nottingham Open Churches Project website.

Angel Row History Forum

The Angel Row History Forum was launched in January 2011 and was established "to provide a meeting place for anyone with an active interest in local history and other heritage matters in and around Nottingham."

It is planned to meet four times in 2012 and a special event (the 'Angel Row History Fest') has been organised for Saturday 12 May to promote local history periodicals, books and volunteering in the Greater Nottingham area.

For further information please visit the Nottinghamshire Local History Association website.

Events at Nottinghamshire Archives in 2012

Nottinghamshire Archives have organised a series of workshops, each one devoted to particular classes of records:

• 18 April 2012 - Military records
• 16 May 2012  -  Police records
• 20 June 2012  -  Records of royalty
• 25 July 2012  -  Apprenticeship records
• 15 August 2012  -  Nottingham City Council and its records
• 19 September 2012  -  Electoral registers

Archives skills workshops are also being run:

• 8 June 2012   -   Reading parish registers (English)
• 15 June 2012   -   Reading parish registers (Latin)
• 24 August 2012   -   Finding Your Way Around Nottinghamshire Archives

There are also organised tours of the building on the first Thursday of every month:

• 5 April 2012
• 3 May 2012
• 7 June 2012
• 5 July 2012
• 2 August 2012

MAKE HISTORY HAPPEN! Youth Heritage Conference 2012
A conference aimed at young people aged 16-21 with an interest in heritage will take place at The Lakeside Arts Centre, University Park, Nottingham on Wednesday 18 July 2012: 10.00am – 4.30pm.

For further details on all these events see the Nottinghamshire Archives website.

The Nottinghamshire Historian, No.88 (Spring/Summer 2012)

The latest edition of The Nottinghamshire Historian journal has arrived and contains the following articles:

• The leather industry in Nottingham with particular reference to Turney Brothers’ Leather Works, Trent Bridge
• Commemoration of the 1817 Pentrich Rising
• The Nellie Greenhill Memorial Prize

The issue also includes a wide range of news items, book reviews and list of local history lectures in the county. Further information on the journal and the Nottinghamshire Local History Association is available on the website.

Event: 'New windows on our past: recent archaeological discoveries in Nottinghamshire', 31 March 2012

The Nottinghamshire Local History Association has organised a day-school on Saturday 31 March devoted to recent archaeological work in the county. The programe includes:

• 12 years of excavation on the Romano-British site at Besthorpe Quarry in the Trent valley
• Archaeology under the A46: results of the initial assessment
• Roman remains at Southwell
• Community excavation of Kirkby Hardwick manor house

The event will take place at the Village Hall, Ravenshead between 10 and 4.15.

Fee £6.50 for members of the NLHA, £7.50 for non-members.
Please contact David Anderson, 35 Sycamore Road, East Leake, Loughborough LE12 6PP or telephone 01623 870515, to secure your place or for more information. Attendance is possible without booking, although it is helpful to the Association to know how many are attending.

New book: 'Awsworth through time' by Bryan Maloney

Amberley Publishing have recently published another attractive book in their 'Through Time' series. Awsworth is a little known village on the Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire border about 6 miles north-west of Nottingham. Glass was made here in the late 17th century and mining was the principal occupation of its inhabitants by the late 19th century. The Nottingham Canal was constructed around the village in the 1790s and two monumental railway viaducts were built nearby to carry lines across the Erewash valley in the 1870s: the brick-built '40 Bridges' was sadly demolished in 1973 but the impressive iron-built Bennerley Viaduct still stands.

The author, Bryan Maloney, has assembled a fine selection of images to show how the village and its people have changed over the last 120 years. What is striking is just how much of the industrial past has vanished from the area: much of Nottingham Canal in the area was removed as part of open-cast coal mining or to make way for roads, the chemical works and Bennerley ironworks have long since vanished, the railway network torn up and the mines closed. 

Rather than just provide an endless succession of photographs of streets and buildings Bryan has wisely opted to give equal weight to the human dimension so there are many photographs of village events, sporting teams, school classes and local characters. I was particularly struck by the photograph of Don Brown which shows him seemingly leaping to his doom from the 40 Bridges railway viaduct (he was, in fact, jumping onto the earth embankment at the western end of the viaduct). The sepia image of the Awsworth Bicycle Club, gathered in an orderly fashion outside The Gate pub in the early 1900s is another favourite.

Bryan should be commended for making this collection available to the wider public as many of the photographs are from private sources and have not been seen before. I should admit a personal interest here as I had a minor role in helping to prepare the photographs for publication and it is rewarding to see how well they look on the page despite the poor quality of some of the originals.

It is a splendid collection of images with very informative captions.

• Book details on the Amberley Publishing website

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

English Civil War museum planned for Newark

Newark and Sherwood District Council has agreed to submit a bid for £3m to the Heritage Lottery Fund to establish a "national Civil War museum" in Newark. The plan is to use the Old Magnus Buildings (which ironically used to house the town's museum until a few years ago) on Appleton Gate to accommodate the new museum.

• Article in the Newark Advertiser
• Friends of Newark Museum website

King John's Palace at Kings Clipstone on Time Team

The new series of Channel 4's Time Team has just started and the episode devoted to the excavation of the medieval royal palace and hunting lodge at Kings Clipstone will air on 1st April. At long last the programme has   made it to darkest Nottinghamshire - it's only taken 19 years!

While we wait with eager anticipation there are some nice photos of the dig on the Nottingham University website and a report and photos on the Mansfield Chad site.

For Sale: 43 to 59 Castle Gate and Severns House, Nottingham

A substantial part of Castle Gate is being put on the market by Nottingham City Council. The fine Georgian terrace which once housed the Costume Museum and the 14th century Severn's House are being sold on behalf of the council by Bruton Knowles. The medieval Severn's House was originally located on Middle Pavement but was dismantled, moved, and re-erected in its current position back in 1968 to make way for the Broadmarsh Centre.

• Bruton Knowles
• Nottingham Evening Post article

Tours of Welbeck Abbey, August-September 2012

This year there will be a  rare opportunity to see the state rooms at Welbeck Abbey. The Harley Gallery is organising tours of the house (though sadly not the underground ballroom or tunnels) in August and September. Tickets are selling fast so if you are interested see the Harley Gallery website.

Nottingham University Local History Seminars, January-March 2012

Nottingham University's School of History is running a series of Saturday Local History Seminars early next year. They take place at the School of History in Lenton House, start at 10am and admission costs £5. The programme is as follows:

• 14 January 2012 – Researching Nottinghamshire's Architectural History by Elaine Harwood (English Heritage)
• 11 February 2012 – Going Local with the National Trust by Ben Cowell (National Trust)
• 10 March 2012  – The South Oxfordshire Project: Perceptions of Landscapes, Settlement and Society, c500-1650 by Stephen Mileson (VCH and editor of the Oxoniensia journal) 

Full details from Professor John Beckett at john.beckett@nottingham.ac.uk

The latest from Nottinghamshire Archives

Two new publications from Nottinghamshire County Council's Libraries, Archives and Information department offer a bit of a contrast:

• A Grisly History of Nottinghamshire is aimed at children and "reveals the gory details of the bloody and gruesome history of Nottinghamshire" - sounds fun!
• Stone Age Nottinghamshire, written by David Budge and Chris Robinson, is a well illustrated guide to the archaeology of Stone Age Nottinghamshire and includes the recent discoveries from Creswell Crags caves 

Nottinghamshire Archives is also offering free 15-minute 'taster sessions' to introduce new users to the search room (how to use the microfiche machines, finding your way around the catalogues and indexes etc). You can also take part in one of the 'special interest' topics on offer:

• Cemetery records
• Electoral registers
• Building plans
• Maps
• Poor law records.

More information is available on the Nottinghamshire Archives website.

Friends of Newark and Sherwood Museum Service launch, 15 December

The Friends of Newark and Sherwood Museum Service are holding a launch event this Thursday between 6 and 9pm at the Millgate Museum in Newark.

The group has been set up to "to educate, promote, support, assist and improve the Newark and Sherwood Museum Service" and alongside the launch event they are promoting their "Adopt an Object" project which encourages members of the public to adopt objects in the museum collections.

More information on the Friends' website: www.civilwarnewark.co.uk/