Loughborough local history rooted in Charnwood

So, lynneaboutloughborough has been out and about and a bit busy again this week! Let me tell you about it!

During the week there was a meeting about the Old Rectory Museum: don't forget, they are open most Saturdays from now until the end of October, and the new display is about the Civil War at Cotes. Check out their facebook group to keep up with the latest news!

Pop-up cinema at the Charnwood Roots Festival

Cinema is big on my list of interests, so I was really enthralled to listen to Brian Johnson talk about the village cinemas of Leicestershire and Rutland. Ok, so this didn't cover any of the cinemas in Loughborough, but it was fascinating to learn about all the little cinemas in the surrounding villages, the ways they were run, and the antics that both people running them and people visiting them got up to! 

The Roman mosaics in Leicester with GCR behind

Saturday we ventured further afield and had a tour of the excavations taking place in Leicester under what was the Stibbe building (the one in town, opposite the Highcross, not the one near De Montfort University that was demolished about 10 years ago). Yes, on one side was the Highcross shopping centre, but on the other side was the former Great Central Station. According to our guide, the company responsible for building the new premises will also be renovating the station, so that's something to look forward to. Anyway, we saw some stunning Roman mosaic floors, some surviving Roman wall, layers and layers of road surfaces, including the Roman one, and glimpses of the hypocaust. All this will be eventually displayed in the Jewry Wall Museum.  

 
Today, I was lucky enough to be able to go to the Charnwood Roots Festival, and gosh, did I have a great time!!! Charnwood Roots is a lottery-funded project to delve into the history of the towns and villages in Charnwood - so that includes Loughborough - uncover the facts and the stories, which will eventually be written up as part of the Victoria County Histories. These VCHs were originally created in the early 1900s and were a comprehensive guide to each parish in the country. However, although other counties have published updated versions of their histories, Leicestershire's, which was originally published in 1907, was briefly updated by W G Hoskins in the 1950s, but has not revised recently.

According to Professor Chris Dyer, Emeritus Professor of History in the Centre for English Local History at Leicester University, the idea to revise the Leicestershire VCH was re-born around 2007, and after applying for Heritage Lottery Funding, the Charnwood Roots project took off in about 2013. This project has seen hundreds of volunteers from across Charnwood get involved in researching the history of the area, from religion to work, from archaeology to education, from crime and punishment to health, from the land-owning gentry to the lowly peasant. 

In his lecture, Professor Dyer stressed that every place has a history, but that that history is more than just the infamous little Civil War skirmish, or the famous person who hails from the place. History is more than this. History exists partly because of the people who lived, worked and died in a place, so it's a combination of the experience of hundreds of people over thousands of years. People's experiences make history, and if we care to look around us we can find information about our hamlet / village / town history by simply looking - think of buildings and their architecture, place, street and field names, the village plan, the archaeology, the landscape etc.. When this is added to interpretation of the wealth of written records that exist - parish registers, wills, census returns, newspapers, memoirs etc. - the history can be extensive.   

The Charnwood Roots Festival was staged to present some of the research that has been done, this presentation being achieved through lectures, films (on laptops and in the pop-up cinema - pic above), storyboards, displays and interactive opportunities. Alongside this "story of the stone wood", local history societies and local heritage sites, local researchers and other organisations showcased their own work, information being presented in banners, artefacts, leaflets, books, noticeboards, and some very passionate people!

I spent most of the day talking: talking to people I know and love, and to people I've never met before; talking to people about things I was also passionate about, and I talked to people about things for which I only had a passing interest. I found out who some of blog readers are, and I promised to include some posts from new angles, so do look out for those over the coming months! I even managed to talk to some people about the #delaytheonsetofdementia initiative I run as part of my role as a DMU Dementia Ambassador!

So, enough writing, let's get to the pics!! Some didn't come out too well, as Beaumanor Hall can be quite dark downstairs and I didn't like to put my flash on, and some of my angles were a bit odd, so here's the best selection!

You are welcome to quote passages from any of my posts, with appropriate credit. The correct citation for this looks as follow:

Dyer, Lynne (2017). Loughborough local history rooted in Charnwood. Available from: http://lynneaboutloughborough.blogspot.com/2017/05/loughborough-local-history-rooted-in.html [Accessed 21 May 2017]

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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.

Thank you for reading this blog. 

Lynne 

Fun in Loughborough

Over the last 10 weeks I’ve been blogging about a variety of things relevant to Lufbra – shopping, local initiatives, local places of interest, local people and more – so today I shall turn my attention to a number of local events that I have recently attended, which were certainly interesting!

Play in the park

The bandstand in Queen's Park

One of my blogposts was about Queen’s Park, and it was here, a fortnight ago, that I spent a very happy couple of hours. I often find myself walking through the park, either on my way into town or to the library, or just because I fancy doing so, but never after dusk when the park is closed! However, this particular evening some of us snuck in, after hours! All legal and above board – just in case you were wondering!

The bandstand adorned!

Imagine the park, if you will, with 1930s music playing from a gazebo, lights shining out from the café, fairy lights adorning and twinkling around the bandstand, and sofas, scattered with cushions, placed around it. Suddenly, the sound of car engines, distant at first, gradually getting louder until the vintage special rolled up to one side of the bandstand, and a 1970s hotrod raced up to the other side! And just as the cars arrived the French maid, who’d been swigging wine from a bottle, rushed to retrieve her shoes from the bushes and smooth down her hair and apron, before beating a hasty retreat from the bandstand!

This was the opening scene of Noel Coward’s “Private Lives”, a play based around the marriages of four characters, who were all spending their honeymoon in Paris, and unbeknownst to them are staying in adjoining rooms to their former spouses! The actors were students from Loughborough University, part of a group called the “English and Drama Theatre Company”, and they did a wonderful job of bringing Coward’s characters to life – and some!!

Warned to bring blankets – and not to bring alcohol – the audience were treated to chairs gathered around the bandstand, and cocktails were available from the café! Although this was late September, the weather was very mild, and with the silhouette of the Carillon in the background, the atmosphere was, well, nothing less than electric!

The actors and the audience

This was a truly remarkable event which brought “town and gown” together in a collaboration that made fantastic use of a remarkable setting that is normally only accessible in the daytime. For me, it was great not to have to travel miles to an outdoor play – although, perhaps Queen’s Park doesn’t quite have the setting of the Minack! The production was part of the Fab Friday initiative that I believe came about as a result of Mary Portas’s visit to the town, but I’m really hoping that this wasn’t a one-off event.

Charnwood roots

Last Saturday saw me in Leicester attending the Charnwood Roots project meeting. This initiative is all about updating the Victoria County History series of books, and the Leicestershire volume(s) had not been updated for a very long time. The area that was being focussed on was Charnwood Forest, which included about 35 towns and villages in Leicestershire, which included Loughborough, Hathern, Mountsorrel, and Barrow. The aim of the project seems to be to do research in local archives, take part in an archaeological dig, be involved in making a record of oral history, do some field-walking and various other things in order to update the history. The whole process is being led by staff at Leicester University and is going to take a couple of years to complete. After the introduction to the project, a member of the team talked about his visit to California where he was able to personally consult the Hastings papers: This archival material, pertaining to Loughborough, some of which goes back to Medieval times, was sold many years ago, and deposited and preserved by the Huntington Library in San Marino, for future use. Some of the material was digitised in the very early days of digitisation, but, as the lecturer enthused, there’s nothing quite like being able to handle the original documents! As I said, the project will be going on for a couple of years, and at the end of the presentations we were invited to sign up to take part in any, some, or all of the proposed activities: I can’t wait to get going!

LAHS  

That same evening, I made my way to our own university to join some new friends at the first meeting of the year of the Loughborough Archaeological and Historical Society. The presentation that evening was given by Peter Liddle, former Leicestershire County Archaeologist. My knowledge of monastic buildings was quite scant, but by the time Peter had described the 15 or so abbeys in Leicestershire and the evidence that the archaeology had brought to light, I definitely had much more of an idea about the archaeology and the history, and picked up a few pointers to some possible future research I could do myself.

Laughter in the library

The Carnegie Library

Last Thursday saw the birthday of my youngest child. His elder two siblings have gone off to university, so he was left at home to celebrate the occasion with his mum and dad! After a great meal at the Cactus Café, we went off to Laughter in the Library, a couple of hours of stand-up comedy. Again, great to see a space that’s not normally open until 11pm being used after-hours!

The Organ Grinder

The library has recently been re-furbished, and the taller shelving units replaced with lower shelving units on castors. This meant that a flexible space could be created by moving the units around. The use of a café-style table layout, complete with strings of fairy lights, helped make for an enjoyable experience. Even more surreal was the fact that there was also a bar run by the folk from the Packe Horse  Organ Grinder: They did quite a good trade! The acts were really quite good, and much mention was made of the fact that we were in the local library, especially by the compere. The days of libraries being run by ladies with buns, shushing people and throwing them out for eating and drinking in the building has well and truly passed!