Loughborough Heritage Open Weekend Walks

In previous years, several Loughborough venues have taken part in the national Heritage Open Days (HODs) event, throwing open their grounds, doors, and towers for free to visitors.

This year, a number of building owners, organisations, and groups got together to plan a more extensive event over the final weekend of the HODs event, which has resulted in over a dozen opportunities for you to visit some of Loughborough’s buildings, take part in roadshows and workshops, or go on a walk around the town!

Loughborough’s Heritage Open Weekend takes place on Saturday 14th and Sunday 15th September.  

Why not come along to one of the four walks that are being offered by the Loughborough Library Local Studies Volunteer Group? More details of these walks are below, and details of other events taking place over the weekend will appear on this blog next Sunday!

The Loughborough Suffragette Trail

Walk Leader: Yvonne Casswell

Date: Saturday 14th September, 10.00-11.30

As part of Loughborough’s Heritage weekend in September there will be a trail following the steps of the suffragette movement in the town. Many people will know of the Pankhurst family setting up the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1903 and of Alice Hawkins’ activities in Leicester. The Loughborough Branch of the WSPU was founded in 1909. Meetings were held at the Town Hall and outdoors in the Market Place. The latter were often rowdy affairs with local activists and visiting speakers subjected to heckling, jeering and being pelted with orange peel and eggs. Familiar names such as Emmeline Pankhurst, Alice Hawkins and Annie and Nellie Kenney were among those activists who visited Loughborough to promote the cause and inspire local supporters.

In Loughborough Kathleen and Nora Corcoran are remembered for their work for the women’s suffrage cause in the last few years leading up to the outbreak of war in 1914.  In 1910 controversy arose as the local Liberal M.P., Sir Maurice Levy had not supported women’s suffrage in the absence of full male suffrage. Meetings in this year when there were elections in January and December were particularly noisy and rowdy and the police were needed to escort the women to safety.

The scene of the only “outrage” by suffragettes took place in the Red House on Burton Walks in October 1913.  Find out why this property, empty at the time, was targeted.  Pamphlets about Emily Davison and her attempt to stop the King’s horse were found there.  The ‘Loughborough Echo’ reported that although the incident aroused anti-suffragette feelings locally, people blamed outsiders rather than local ladies. Local newspapers and quotes from politicians reflected the misogyny of the period.

Also in 1913 the Corcoran sisters were active in the Women’s Tax Resistance League and refused to pay their house duty. An auction was held by a tax collector to raise money to clear the debt.

The Leicestershire County Council Green Plaque unveiled in 2019

The trail was created by the Loughborough Library Local Studies Volunteers based on a publication by Mike Shuker for Leicestershire Labour History Society [1].

Yvonne Casswell

The Zeppelin Raid

Walk Leader: David Kirkby

Date: Saturday 14th September, 14.00-15.30

On the night of January 31st 1916, Loughborough was bombed by a Zeppelin of the German Naval Airship Division, ten people were killed and twelve others injured with the majority needing treatment at Loughborough Hospital, on Baxter Gate. 

But, why was Loughborough a target, where were the bombs dropped, who were the casualties and who were the heroes?

On Saturday September 14th all will be revealed, following an insight into what Loughborough was like at this period of World War One we follow the path of the Zeppelin, from Queen’s Park to Empress Road, that brought so much devastation and sorrow to Loughborough.

We look at the bomb sites and we reflect on the casualties. We also look at the importance and significance of major buildings in the town at the time.

Memorial in The Rushes

Recognised on the day will be those locals who put their own lives at risk for the sake of others.

David Kirkby

Loughborough’s Art Deco Buildings

Walk Leader: Lynne Dyer

Date: Sunday 15th September, 10.00-11.30 

While you’ve been out and about around Loughborough town centre, have you noticed some of its beautiful Art Deco buildings? Loughborough is no Miami or Napier, but it does have some lovely examples of buildings designed during the period when Art Deco was fashionable.

On this walk around Loughborough, you’ll see some of these buildings for yourself, hear about some of the style’s key features, and come to understand perhaps why there are so many of these buildings in the town centre.

A wonderful example of an Art Deco building!

Why not come along on this guided walk, and discover some of Loughborough’s Art Deco treasures, hidden in plain sight?!

 

Loughborough’s Heritage Sites

Walk Leader: Lynne Dyer

Date: Sunday 15th September, 14.00-15.30

During Heritage Open Days 2024, some of Loughborough’s marvellous buildings have been open for you to visit and enjoy over the weekend. Don’t worry if you’ve missed seeing them this year, as this afternoon walk will showcase many of them, so you will be able to at least view them from pavement, and hear a little bit of their history.

Although it won’t be possible to walk to all of the buildings which have been open this weekend, as they are spread right across the town, those that are central to Loughborough town centre will be included.

Courtesy of the Loughborough Library Volunteer Group

Do please come along on this walk and help to make Loughborough’s Heritage Open Weekend a success! National Heritage Open Days is an annual event, so the more people who support Loughborough’s offering this year, the more likely it is to be repeated next year!    

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NOTES

[1] Shuker, Mike (2018). Suffragettes in Loughborough. IN: Leicestershire Labour History Society Journal, Vol.1, No.2 [Online] Available from: https://issuu.com/charnwoodarts/docs/suffragettes_in_loughborough_pamphl  

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Further Resources

Some of the UK’s most spectacular Art Deco buildings captured on postcards

https://www.francisfrith.com/uk/blog/art-deco-architecture-in-britain

 

Some of the most exciting Art Deco buildings to visit in London

https://www.londonxlondon.com/art-deco-buildings-london/

 

Guided tours of Nottingham’s Art Deco buildings

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/cc/deco-in-the-details-3590719  

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About Yvonne

Yvonne has lived in Loughborough for five years. She was born and brought up in S. Wales, and came to Leicestershire to study at Leicester University. She married, and she and her husband have two grown up children. She spent some time working in education. After retiring Yvonne volunteered as a cottage guide at Stoneywell, a nearby National Trust property. More recently, she has volunteered with the Loughborough Library Local Studies Volunteer Group.

About David Kirkby (MInstLM, MSET, LCGI, MGB)

Born in Leicester but lived for the majority of his life in Loughborough.

Educated at Shelthorpe School, Garendon High School, Burleigh Community College, Loughborough College, Leicester College, Derby College and De Montfort University.

Bricklayer by trade, time served Apprentice at H. Hammond and Sons Ltd. & Journeyman Bricklayer for William Moss and Sons.

Former Lecturer in Construction at Leicester College, Derby College & Brooksby College.

Former Head of Construction at Derby College, Fern Training & Brooksby College.

Member of the Loughborough Library Local Studies Volunteer Group with a passion for history, locally, nationally, internationally, & family.

About Lynne

Lynne trained as an accredited Leicestershire Tour Guide in 2013, and has been leading guided walks around Loughborough since that time. She also writes books and gives presentations about Loughborough, and is the main writer for this blog.

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Please note, the views expressed in this Guest Blog Post are the views of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the blog owner, lynneaboutloughborough.

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Posted by lynneaboutloughborough

With apologies for typos which are all mine!

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Thank you for reading this blog.

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The copyright © of all content on this blog rests with me, or in the case of guest blogposts, with the named Guest Blogger. However, you are welcome to quote passages from any of my posts, with appropriate credit. The correct citation for this looks as follows:

Dyer, Lynne (ed.) (2024). Loughborough Heritage Open Weekend Walks. Available from: https://lynneaboutloughborough.blogspot.com/2024/08/loughborough-heritage-open-weekend-walks.html [Accessed 25 August 2024]

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Walking and mapping the trees

I seem to have spent much of the past week out walking in one place or another!! Some walks have been local, some not! Some have been along countryside paths, others have been around Loughborough town centre! All of them have been enjoyable!

I’ve just been alerted to a lovely website that allows you to log and share the position of important (in the sense of being old or notable for some reason) trees! I’ve posted about trees before ! I absolutely love them! So, to find a website where I can pinpoint specific trees, or groups of trees to go and see makes me happy!

A few snaps of some trees I spotted along the Grantham Canal, close-ish to Belvoir Castle last weekend.

Some photos from last week’s visit to Swithland Wood.

 

On a walk around Garendon Park earlier this week, someone pointed out a sweet chestnut tree to me, and it’s on the map, as are many of the other trees on the estate!!

The sweet chestnut tree

 

The lovely Cedar of Lebanon, which is on the university campus, and would have been very close to Burleigh Hall, is also on the map.

The Isaac Newton tree on the university campus is not on the map though, ut maybe that's because it is still fairly new?

One that I didn’t see on the map, however, which I would have expected to, is one that on the rather more common online map is called The Great Oak Tree, and is off the footpath that goes through Woodthorpe, and then crosses the fields to come out just below Beaumanor Hall.

 

How wonderful, that our local Booth Wood has now been designated as a local nature reserve!

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Posted by lynneaboutloughborough

With apologies for typos which are all mine!

_______________________________________________

Thank you for reading this blog.

Copyright:

The copyright © of all content on this blog rests with me, however, you are welcome to quote passages from any of my posts, with appropriate credit. The correct citation for this looks as follows:

Dyer, Lynne (2024). Walking and mapping the trees. Available from: https://lynneaboutloughborough.blogspot.com/2024/08/walking-and-mapping-trees.html [Accessed 18 August 2024]

Take down policy:

I post no pictures that are not my own, unless I have express permission so to do. All text is my own, and not copied from any other information sources, printed or electronic, unless identified and credited as such. If you find I have posted something in contravention of these statements, or if there are photographs of you which you would prefer not to be here, please contact me at the address listed on the About Me page, and I will remove these.

External Links:

By including links to external sources I am not endorsing the websites, the authors, nor the information contained therein, and will not check back to update out-of-date links. Using these links to access external information is entirely the responsibility of the reader of the blog.

Blog archive and tags:

If you are viewing this blog in mobile format, you will not be able to easily access the blog archive, or the clickable links to various topics. These can be accessed if you scroll to the bottom of the page, and click 'View Web Version'. Alternatively, there is also a complete list of posts, which when clicked will take you to the page you are interested in.

Searching the blog:

You can search the blog using the dedicated search box that appears near the top of the blog when viewed in the web version. Alternatively, you can search using your usual search engine (e.g. Bing, Google, DuckDuckGo etc.) by following this example:

site: https://lynneaboutloughborough.blogspot.com/ “Radmoor House”

NOTE – the words you’re actually looking for must be in “” and the first of these must be preceded by a space

Thank you for reading this blog!

Lynne

Loughborough's Second Workhouse

Following her very interesting article about Mary Tate of Burleigh Hall on this blog last year, and delving more deeply than my own earlier posts on the topic [1] in this guest blog post for lynneaboutloughborough's eleventh birthday, Dr Pamela Fisher describes the circumstances which led to the construction of the Loughborough Union Workhouse, which was the second workhouse in Loughborough. This building was a familiar sight to many of us, especially if we lived, as I did, in the Oxford Street area of town, although thankfully we are unlikely to have spent any time within its confines – but we probably knew of people who had. 

Here's what Pam has to say about the workhouse ...

Loughborough's Second Workhouse

By Pamela J. Fisher  

The parish of Loughborough contained the townships of Knightthorpe and Woodthorpe, which looked after their own poor. Within Loughborough, a workhouse had been built on Sparrow Hill (as it then was) in 1749–52. This originally housed paupers who were set to work spinning and knitting, but by 1834 policies had changed and this housed only the elderly and those unable to work through disability. This blog post is about the building of Loughborough’s second workhouse in 1838, which replaced this earlier building.

By the early 19th century, the cost of poor relief was rising rapidly across the country. Parishes were managing this by employing a range of different strategies and scales of allowances. New legislation in 1834 swept away these arrangements and replaced them by a single system that grouped parishes together in Poor Law Unions. Each Union was managed by an elected board of guardians, acting under instructions issued by the London-based Poor Law Commissioners. Each would maintain a workhouse that was designed to be a deterrent, with living conditions deliberately worse than those of the poorest independent labourer. Once the workhouse was built, the Guardians were instructed not to pay any poor relief to able-bodied people, other than in cases of short-term sickness, forcing them to enter the workhouse if they had no relatives to help. Workhouse residents had to wear a workhouse uniform and have their head shaved to maintain hygiene. Families would be split up. Food and accommodation were basic, and unpleasant menial work was expected from all able-bodied residents. Anyone absconding could be prosecuted for the theft of the workhouse clothes they were wearing.

Loughborough Poor Law Union was formed in 1837 and comprised 14 parishes and townships in north Leicestershire (Loughborough, Knightthorpe, Woodthorpe, Belton, Burton-on-the-Wolds, Charley, Cotes, Hathern, Hoton, Long Whatton, Prestwold, Shepshed, Thorpe Acre with Dishley and Wymeswold) and ten in south Nottinghamshire (Costock, East Leake, Normanton-on-Soar, Rempstone, Stanford-on-Soar, Sutton Bonnington, Thorpe-in-the-Glebe, West Leake, Willoughby-on-the-Wolds and Wysall). Twenty-eight guardians were elected, four for Loughborough, one for Knightthorpe, one for Woodthorpe, two for Shepshed and one for each of the remaining 20 parishes. Loughborough’s first guardians were William Paget, John Cartwright, Benjamin Churchill and James North.

Loughborough, Shepshed and Hoton already had parish workhouses, Shepshed with accommodation for 80, Loughborough for 70 and Hoton for six, but these were too small for the new Union. When the guardians met formally as a board for the first time on 11th September 1837 they were aware that the Commissioners required them to find a site large enough to contain a workhouse for 350 men, women and children, which was to cost no more than £550. Fuller directions were issued on 6 October: the plans were to be approved by the Commissioners, the building was to cost less than £6,000 and it was to be completed within 12 months. The parishes in the union were each to contribute a share of the costs.

The guardians agreed to purchase a plot of land for £550 that stood at the edge of the town, south of Derby Road and to the west of Regent Street (then Lower Regent Street). Wood’s 1837 plan of Loughborough shows this area shortly before the purchase and identifies the owners as John and Edward Cooper (Map 1). 

Map1: Wood's Plan of Loughborough, 1837, courtesy of Loughborough Library

On 26th September 1837 the Board invited interested architects to forward their plans for the building, at a scale of one-eighth of an inch to one foot, drawings of the ‘front and side elevations – longitudinal section and perspective view of exterior’ and the rate the architect wanted to supervise the construction. These were to be ‘marked by a motto or cypher’ and sent with a sealed envelope containing the name and address of the architect. The design chosen was by George Gilbert Scott and William Bonython Moffatt.

Sir George Gilbert Scott (1811–78) was one of the leading architects of the Gothic Revival in England. His major works include many churches, the Midland Grand Hotel next to St Pancras station and the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens, London, but he was also responsible for the design of many workhouses. Scott trained as an architect, and in late 1834 he was contacted by a friend, Sampson Kempthorne, who had been invited by the Poor Law Commissioners to produce workhouse designs. Kempthorne advised Scott that the premises next door to Kempthorne’s, on London’s Regent Street, had become vacant, and if Scott wished to take them Kempthorne could ‘find employment for his leisure time’ helping with the designs. Scott took the premises, but in early 1835 he received news of the sudden death of his father. This prompted him to decide that his ‘chances in life’ depended upon him establishing his own architectural business.

The New Poor Law of 1834 had created over 500 Poor Law Unions in England and Wales, and a majority of these would need to build a new workhouse. This provided a huge opportunity for Scott to start a practice that could draw on his experience gained with Kempthorne. His first four commissions were for new workhouses in Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire, where he had family contacts, and he employed William Bonython Moffatt to help with the plans. Moffatt and Scott had both been articled to the same firm, and Moffatt already had his own commission to design a new workhouse in Wiltshire. The two men soon became business partners.

Scott later recounted those early days in his Recollections, published in 1879:

‘We went every week to Peele’s coffee-house [in London] to see the country papers, and to find advertisements of pending competitions [for workhouse designs]. Moffatt then ran down to the place to get up information. On his return, we set to work, with violence, to make the design, and to prepare the competition drawings, often working all night as well as all day. He would then start off by the mail [coach – the railway network still being in the future], travel all night, meet the board of guardians, and perhaps win the competition, and return during the next night to set to work on another design.’ Between 1837 and 1841, Scott and Moffatt designed and supervised the building of at least 37 workhouses, with a further six by Scott alone, and one by Moffatt. These stretched from Cornwall through the south-western and midland counties to Lincolnshire and Essex. In Leicestershire Scott and Moffatt were also responsible for the workhouse in Lutterworth. Interestingly Scott was later employed by the parish churches of both Loughborough and Lutterworth in connection with their restorations.

The design for Loughborough workhouse is a variation on one of Kempthorne’s plans. Scott’s plans do not survive, but maps of the town show four ranges of buildings forming the sides of a square (Map 2). 

Map 2: From Ordnance Survey Plan of 1886, National Library of Scotland CC-BY (NLS)

These would probably have contained the work rooms on three sides, with the fourth side, facing Derby Road, containing the main entrance flanked by the board room (to the south) and a chapel (to the north). Three buildings stretched in a straight line across the centre, the central one containing the accommodation for the master and mistress, with the others containing the accommodation and sick wards for the poor, men on one side and women on the other. Walls at right angles to this range created four enclosed recreation areas for men, women, boys and girls. It is not clear where the children would have slept.

On 27th February 1838, following the approval of the plan by the Poor Law Commissioners, the Board of Guardians advertised for sealed tenders for the construction. The nine tenders submitted were opened on 20 March 1838 and ranged from £5,647 to £6,600. Inevitably the lowest was the preferred option, but the contractors, George Myers and Richard Wilson from Hull, were not known to the guardians, who delayed acceptance until they had made enquiries about their suitability. They were awarded the contract on 12th April. Scott later recalled ‘The contractor of a part of the work was a strange rough mason from Hull, named Myers. While engaged under me at Loughborough, he competed with success for the erection of a Roman Catholic Church at Derby, nearly the first which Pugin built’. George Myers (1803–75) had served his apprenticeship under the master mason at Beverley Minster, and after his commission for St Mary’s, Derby (awarded to Myers and Wilson), went on to build most of Pugin’s churches and four Catholic cathedrals, including Birmingham and Nottingham (mostly without Richard Wilson, following the dissolution of their partnership in 1844). Loughborough workhouse was the first large contract awarded to Myers and Wilson, and apparently their first contract outside Hull.

Iron bedsteads were purchased for the workhouse (from Bristol!) in February 1839, and the new building opened (Fig. 1). The old parish workhouse closed, and was altered to provide a barracks for a detachment of the army. James Massey and his wife were appointed master and mistress of the new workhouse when it opened, but James Massey was dismissed in October 1839 on account of his unsatisfactory ‘conduct and general efficiency’. John James, ‘an inmate of the house’, was employed as schoolmaster from the outset and given a contract in April 1839. Hannah Atherstone was appointed schoolmistress in May 1839, but was served with notice in October. Another inmate was appointed as nurse on the sick wards, under the direction of the workhouse medical officer.

Fig 1: Part of the workhouse building, courtesy of Loughborough Library

Loughborough’s overseers of the poor had advised the Poor Law Commissioners in 1834 that vagrancy was an issue in the town, and a ‘mendicity ward’ was added to the workhouse in 1839 for ‘vagrants’, where temporary relief could be given to the homeless. This was replaced by a ‘vagrants’ block’ of separate sleeping cells in 1874, designed by George Hodson of Loughborough.

Through scandals that made national headlines, some of the workhouses of the New Poor Law deserved the notorious reputation that they all gained by association, yet although Victorian society viewed some paupers as ‘undeserving’, many recognised that the elderly poor and the sick might be in the workhouse through no fault of their own. Details of the 12 ‘sick wards’ in Loughborough Union workhouse in 1867 paint a picture of a caring institution for these residents. It is possible some short-term changes were hastily introduced when the guardians were told that their wards were to be inspected as part of a parliamentary enquiry, but there is a limit to how much equipment could be acquired and brought in at short notice. Although the focus of this blog is on the building of the workhouse, it is therefore worth including some of the inspection comments here:

‘In the female sick wards each patient has the following articles for her own use exclusively; viz., a tea tray, tea cloth, towel, comb and brush, soap, wash-hand basin, basket for clothes, cup and saucer and plate, locker (with drawer, shelf, and open cupboard), urinal, and cape. There are arm chairs, easy chairs, rocking chairs, flannel gowns and slippers, coloured and other screens, tables, lockers, cupboards, water cushions, mackintosh sheeting (but without funnels), foot and chest warmers, medicine glasses and pots, bed rests, a library, prints, illustrated periodicals, benches with backs, some cushions, pottery plates and mugs, cocoa fibre matting, carpets, and clocks.’

The board of guardians assembled for a photograph at an unknown date (Fig. 2). 

Fig 2: The board of guardians outside the workhouse, courtesy of Loughborough Library

Could this be the last board marking the end of an era, or is this slightly earlier? The board was disbanded in 1930, and the premises were transferred to Loughborough Borough Council to become a public assistance institution known as Hastings House. It became an NHS hospital in 1948, and was renamed Regent Hospital c.1981. Regent Hospital closed in 1992, when Loughborough’s new Community Hospital opened on Epinal Way. The former workhouse buildings were then demolished, with the site redeveloped for housing (Pleasant Close, Speeds Pingle and Armitage Close).

Pam Fisher

Leicestershire Victoria County History Trust

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Notes

[1] Following a visit to Southwell Workhouse, which is owned by the National Trust, I wrote a few articles about Loughborough’s Union Workhouse, and George Hodson’s connection to it 

There is a further photograph of the workhouse from the rear on the Gilbert family website. 

Aerial views can be seen on the Remember Loughborough Facebook group 

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Image credits

Map 1, Fig. 1 and Fig. 2: Loughborough Library

Map 2: National Library of Scotland CC-BY (NLS) https://maps.nls.uk/

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Sources

Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland: G/7/8a/1–2 (guardians’ minutes, Loughborough Union); G/7/8c/1 (building committee minutes, Loughborough Union); G/7/32/1 (building contract, Loughborough Union).

British Newspaper Archive: Leicester Chronicle, 30 Sept. 1837, 31 Aug. 1839; Leicester Journal, 9 Mar. 1838, 25 Oct. 1839.

Parliamentary Papers: Poor Law Commissioners, First Annual Report (1835 (500) xxxv), Appendix A; Provincial Workhouses, Report of Dr Edward Smith (1867–8 (4) lx).

G.G. Scott (ed. G. Stamp), Personal and Professional Recollections (Stamford, 1995).

K.A. Morrison, ‘The New-Poor-Law workhouses of George Gilbert Scott and William Bonython Moffatt’, Architectural History, 40 (1997), 184–203.

P. Spencer-Silver, ‘George Myers, 1803–75, stonemason, builder, contractor’, Construction History, 5 (1989), 47–57.

K. Morrison, The Workhouse: A Study of Poor-Law Buildings in England (RCHM/English Heritage, 1999).

P. Higginbotham, https://www.workhouses.org.uk/Loughborough/

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About Dr Pamela Fisher

Dr Pamela Fisher works with Leicestershire Victoria County History Trust and is currently researching and writing a social and cultural history of Loughborough since 1750. This will be followed by a history of the town’s industries. Both will be published as part of the national Victoria County History series of books. You can follow progress on Twitter and Facebook (@LeicsVCHT) or make contact through their website https://leicestershirehistory.co.uk/ to be added to their mailing list for Newsletters and updates. 

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Posted by lynneaboutloughborough

With apologies for typos which are all mine!

_______________________________________________

Thank you for reading this blog.

Copyright:

The copyright © of all content on this blog rests with me, or in the case of guest blogposts, with the named Guest Blogger. However, you are welcome to quote passages from any of my posts, with appropriate credit. The correct citation for this looks as follows:

Fisher, Pamela, Dr. (2024). Loughborough’s Second Workhouse. Available from: https://lynneaboutloughborough.blogspot.com/2024/08/loughboroughs-second-workhouse.html [Accessed 11 August 2024]

Take down policy:

I post no pictures that are not my own, unless I have express permission so to do. All text is my own, and not copied from any other information sources, printed or electronic, unless identified and credited as such. If you find I have posted something in contravention of these statements, or if there are photographs of you which you would prefer not to be here, please contact me at the address listed on the About Me page, and I will remove these.

Blog archive and tags:

If you are viewing this blog in mobile format, you will not be able to easily access the blog archive, or the clickable links to various topics. These can be accessed if you scroll to the bottom of the page, and click 'View Web Version'. Alternatively, there is also a complete list of posts, which when clicked will take you to the page you are interested in.

Searching the blog:

You can search the blog using the dedicated search box that appears near the top of the blog when viewed in the web version. Alternatively, you can search using your usual search engine (e.g. Bing, Google, DuckDuckGo etc.) by following this example:

site: https://lynneaboutloughborough.blogspot.com/ “Radmoor House”

NOTE – the words you’re actually looking for must be in “” and the first of these must be preceded by a space

Thank you for reading this blog.

Lynne

Celebrating the blog's eleventh birthday!

Today the blog is celebrating its 11th birthday - that's 11 years, exactly, which was also a Sunday!!

Last year, in celebration of the blog’s 10th birthday, I hosted a series of 10 blog posts by guest writers during August, and one each in October, November, and December 2023. [1] It was an intense time, and I cannot hope to replicate that this year, but I hope to share with you a few different voices on the blog over the next month or so!

A lot of things have happened since that last celebratory birthday month, and my Loughborough research has taken me in very many directions!

I was particularly pleased to be able to present to you a series of blog posts on the inhabitants of Burleigh Hall, but am very conscious I still have one left to share!!! [2] I was also very pleased that in October 2023, I managed to do a few ‘Spotlight on Ashby Road’ posts [3] – as follow-ups to a post from October 2013, which has always been one of the most viewed posts on the blog as a whole.

A few posts about pubs appeared on the blog towards the end of 2023, probably because I had uncovered far more information than I could possibly use in my book, ‘Loughborough Pubs’, which came out in November 2023. Early in 2024 saw the usual spread of posts across lots of different Loughborough-related topics, and April saw the posting of a blog post every day, each one related to a letter of the alphabet, as well as four regular Sunday posts (The A-Z Blogging Challenge)! That was a challenge and a half!!!!

May saw the start of a series of posts which shared Edwin Goadby’s ‘History of Loughborough’, as was serialised in the ‘Loughborough Monitor’ in 1864-6. There’s still a way to go with this, with only 7 instalments published to date, and another 16 to go!!

Outside of the blog, I’ve been leading guided walks around Loughborough, giving talks about Loughborough, had a stall at various events (like the Heritage Hub at Leicester University), and shared my experience of blogging at a 10-day long event, called ‘All About That Place’, which was hosted by the Society for One-Place Studies, the Society of Genealogists, and the British Association for Local History. You can view the video either on my YouTube or on the All About That Place YouTube. 

And I’ve had a couple of articles published on the How To History Substack on using local studies libraries (with examples from our very own excellent one) and remembering to look up, down, and all around when searching for local history.

Much of the last year was taken up with research for a new book, called ‘Loughborough At Work’, the manuscript of which went off to the publisher at the end of May this year. By the time it comes out in September 2025 I will, no doubt, have forgotten everything I wrote about!

Since then I’ve done a few things, which include leading more guided walks, preparing some guided walks for the Heritage Open Days event (more of which in a later post, but just so you know now, several Loughborough venues are taking part this year, and are focussing on the weekend of 14-15 September, under the banner of Loughborough Heritage Open Weekend).

Like last year, when I was involved with showing some American visitors around part of Loughborough, this year I’ve shown other visitors around, most particularly, someone whose father was a student at the university when it was the College of Advanced Technology. Sadly, both buildings with which he had the most association have only very recently been demolished: what used to be the Chemistry/Chem Eng building came down during last summer, and the demolition of Whitworth, the hall of residence originally built for postgraduate students, was completed only two weeks ago, and only a couple of days before the visit). This made recreating 1960s photographs somewhat difficult!!

This year I am again taking part in the All About That Place event, and I’ve nearly completed my recording for this (taking place every hour of every day between 27 September to 6 October).

Planning for the coming year is beginning to take shape, and we have a number of anniversaries to celebrate in 2025! Hoping I can get all this done!!

Meanwhile, the changes that are happening in our town – over the past year, and in the recent weeks – continue to create waves. Great to see buildings refurbished (like Grudgings/Albert Place), sad to see old buildings go, although good to see new ones in their place (like the old labour exchange now the site of flats), sad to see buildings vacated (like the Moon and Bell), and sad to see the announcement of business closures, particularly Revolution and Cineworld. Sometimes it’s difficult to keep track of everything that’s going on!! Oh, and then there's the preparations for the installation of the Hope Bell in Queen's Park, which is likely to be completed by the end of the year!

Anyway, thanks for staying with me these past 11 years, after all, there’d be no point me sharing my love of Loughborough if you weren’t out there reading! And, here’s to another 11 years!!

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Notes

[1] A complete list of blogposts is available here, where you'll find guest posts in green

[2] The Right Honourable Alan Pennington Pt 1; The Right Honourable Alan Pennington Pt 2; The Reverend William Henry Cooper

[3]  Spotlight on Ashby Road - even numbers; Spotlight on Ashby Road - odd numbers; Ashby Road - shops and other buildings

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Posted by lynneaboutloughborough

With apologies for typos which are all mine!

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