Our Mining Heritage event in Eastwood, Sunday 27 May

"Our Mining Heritage" is a forthcoming event designed to celebrate the culture and heritage of the former Nottinghamshire coalfield.

There will be displays with a mining theme and two talks:

• "Having the Crack - Pit Poetry and Humour" from John Stafford and David Amos
• "The Mubu Coalmining Project 2010-12" from David Amos

The event will take place at the D H Lawrence Heritage Centre in Eastwood on Sunday 27 May, 11am-4pm.

Further details are available on Nottingham University's Connected Communities website and David Amos' Facebook site.

Transactions of the Thoroton Society, Volume 115 (2011)

The latest Transactions of the county historical society has just been published. Contents include:

• Settlement Patterns in The Parish Of Bingham, Nottinghamshire from the Mesolithic to Modern Times by Peter Allen 
• Bothamsall Castle, Nottinghamshire an Archaeological and Historical Landscape Analysis by Andy Gaunt and James Wright 
• The Nottinghamshire History Lecture 2011: Trent Bridge School Nottingham 1909-1919: a decade of loyalty, service and endurance by David Nunn 
• 'It's not what you know...' Patronage in eighteenth and nineteenth century Nottinghamshire. Introduction to Patronage essays by Richard Gaunt 
• Patronage and power in eighteenth century Newark by Stanley Chapman 
• The eighteenth century country attorney: Professionalism and Patronage. The Hodgkinsons of Southwell by Michael J. Kirton 
• Church and class patronage in Nottinghamshire in the nineteenth century by Michael Austin 
• Keeping it in the family: political patronage in early nineteenth century Nottinghamshire by Richard Gaunt 
• Samuel Barker: the Duke of Newcastle's head gardener at Clumber, 1899-1935 by Philip Jones 
• The Building Works of William, 4th Lord Byron, at Newstead Abbey, Nottinghamshire 1700-1736 by Rosalys Coope

Further information and ordering details are available on the Thoroton Society website.

Exhibition: “The many lives of DH Lawrence - memoir, legacy and biography revealed”

A new exhibition devoted to D H Lawrence has recently been opened at The Lakeside on the Nottingham University campus. The exhibition draws on the internationally important collection held by Nottingham University and "traces the origins and development of the biographical preoccupation with Lawrence" from the widely different accounts of his life published in the 1930s by his contemporaries to recent academic research based on recent discoveries that offer new perspectives.

Admission is free and a series of talks has been arranged to accompany the exhibition. Further information is available on The Lakeside website.

Angel Row History Day, 12 May

The Nottinghamshire Local History Association has organised a History Day at the Local Studies Department of Nottingham Central Library on Saturday 12 May, 11-3pm.

Groups such as The Thoroton Society and Nottingham Women's History Group are involved and help and advice from archivists and local studies librarians will be available.

All are welcome.

• Download the flyer

Nottinghamshire County Council Community Archaeology

The county council's community archaeology team, supported by local volunteers, has spent another fortnight at Kirkby Hardwick in an attempt to better understand the development of this intriguing site. Photographs of this year's excavation can be viewed on Facebook.

Other recent projects have included a geophysical survey of Willoughby deserted medieval settlement (near Norwell) and Moor Pond Wood at Papplewick.

For more information on their work see:

• Community Archaeology section of the Nottinghamshire County Council website
• Community Archaeology on Facebook

One of the archaeologists, Andy Gaunt, is responsible for the History and Archaeology of Medieval Sherwood Forest website ("a website dedicated to the archaeology and history of Medieval Sherwood Forest; its landscape and people, the dreaded forest law, Robin Hood, and Outlaws and Villains.") - well worth a visit!

Time Team at King John's Palace, Kings Clipstone

It took a while to confirm the details but it appears the Time Team programme on their work at King John's Palace, a royal hunting lodge in Sherwood Forest, is being broadcast at 16.05 on Easter Sunday (8th April).

This will be Time Team's first ever visit to Nottinghamshire in 19 years. They took their time!

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/time-team/episode-guide/series-19/episode-11

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