Ideas Bank

We are very excited to be working on a new community heritage project, the Ideas Bank.

Community groups can submit their ideas for projects on the Ideas Bank website, and then the project team will help them develop their idea into an application to the Heritage Lottery Fund scheme called All Our Stories.

The Research in Community Heritage project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and is about bringing academics and local communities together to support one another in finding out more about community heritage.

We want to find out what local communities are interested in researching, and we are keen to share our knowledge and skills with community groups, as well as helping to develop new ideas for researching local heritage.

More information about the Ideas Bank can be found on the project website, as well as on our project Twitter feed and Facebook page.

We’ll be talking about the Ideas Bank at the Great British Story event at Ickworth House in Suffolk on Sunday 20th May. Do come and say hello if you are there – we’ll be on the ground floor of the Rotunda, alongside the HLF stand. On Sunday 3rd June we’ll be at the Norfolk History Fair at Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse Museum.

More information on the Heritage Lottery Fund ‘All Our Stories’ scheme can be found on their website.

 

Online Maps and Grid References

April means the Landscape MA GIS course is here again, so we’ll be busy spending the next few days working on all sorts of maps. With that in mind, here is a quick run through some of the websites that we use most often for viewing maps and aerial photographs, and for working out grid references of important landscape features.

Norfolk Historic Map Explorer

The new and improved version of the Norfolk Emap Explorer. This allows you to view and compare Tithe Award maps, Enclosure maps, the Six Inch OS map and aerial photographs from 1946 and 1988 for Norfolk. It also now gives eastings and northings (in the bottom left corner of the screen) which is very useful for GIS purposes. It’s probably the best historic map viewer currently available online, but we are terribly biased…

Flash Earth

We’ve long been fans of Neave’s Flash Earth. It’s a quick and uncluttered site that’s great for viewing aerial photography of anywhere in the world. It also gives latitude and longitude in DMS and decimal degrees, which is nice.

Grab a Grid Reference

This website, created by the Bedfordshire Natural History Society, provides an easy way of working out grid references in multiple formats. It also shows grid squares of various sizes to help make sense of the references. The only downside is that there is a daily limit of how many OS tiles you can use, so don’t waste too much time panning around over huge areas! For a more streamlined Google Maps based grid ref finder see UK Grid Reference Finder

Fielden Maps Coordinate Converter

The Fielden Maps Coordinate Converter is an incredibly useful site, which not only allows simple conversions from lat/long to OS grid references, but also includes some rather more obscure systems too. If you ever need to use the GB Yard Grid or the War Office Grid then you know where to come.

We’ll be making use of all of these (and probably a few more) over the next couple of days, and if all goes to plan you should be seeing some of the results of the GIS course on here shortly.

Spring Field Trips

So far this Spring we have been exploring both rural and urban designed landscapes on field trips with our third year students.

Earlier this term we went on a grand day out to London, visiting the Garden Museum in Lambeth to see their exhibition on Garden Cities and Green Cities, which is still open for another week or so.

We also explored the architecture of Whitehall, including Inigo Jones’ Banqueting House, built for Charles I in the 1620s. Then it was off to St James’ Park, Green Park and Buckingham Palace – all thoughts of architecture and landscape design were banished by a glimpse of Prince Charles driving up the Mall…

We spent some time discussing the houses which border onto Green Park, like Spencer House, built in the 1750s, before heading into Bloomsbury to explore the gardens created by Humphry Repton in Russell Square and the rest of the Bedford Estate, including Bedford Place (below) developed in the early years of the nineteenth century.

Back in Norfolk, we have visited one of Humphry Repton’s best known commissions – Sheringham Park. 2012 is the bi-centenery of Repton’s Red Book, and we are involved with a project being run in partnership with the AHRC, the University of Nottingham and the National Trust to celebrate the anniversary (more to come on that soon!).

The sun did come out a couple of times, but we still got a good view over the surrounding landscape from the top of the gazebo on the hill behind the house.

This week the third year students are studying World War Two archaeology, so we made sure that we stopped to investigate the pillbox on the edge of the woods (and wave to a passing steam train).

There are at least two more field trips to come this Spring – fingers crossed that we get some lovely sunshine!

Spring Field Trips in 2010.

Spring Field Trips in 2011.

Michael Wood – The Story of England

This Thursday will be the next in the winter lecture series organised by the Centre of East Anglian Studies.

Historian and broadcaster Michael Wood will talk about his recent BBC TV project taking one village, Kibworth in Leicestershire, through the whole of English history, and looks forward to his forthcoming series on the social history of Britain.

The lecture will take place in Lecture Theatre 1 at 7:15pm on Thursday 23rd February. All are welcome, and there is no need to book.

 

 

 

Norwich Cathedral

This week we were supposed to be going on a field trip into the depths of the Norfolk countryside with the third year students who are taking the work placement unit, ‘Working in the Historic Environment’. The snow and ice, however, put us off a grand expedition and instead we stayed in Norwich and explored the area around the Cathedral.

Norwich Cathedral is one of the buildings that forms part of the Norwich 12, a selection of buildings chosen by Norwich HEART to illustrate the history of the city. Since February 2011 we have been working with HEART on a Knowledge Transfer Partnership project linked to the Norwich 12. As part of this, three of our third-year students have undertaken placements with HEART to work on the HistOracle project, writing content for the website and interactive display which will allow users to explore the history of the 12 sites in more detail.

In seminars for the Working in the Historic Environment module we have spent a lot of time discussing the challenges of presenting academic research on buildings and landscapes to the public, particularly for places like Norwich Cathedral. Sites with a long and complex history present many challenges – what to focus on, what to leave out and how to balance the stories of people, events, architecture and landscape.

During the morning we explored the Cathedral and cloister, the buildings within the Cathedral Close, Pull’s Ferry and the Cow Tower (part of the city’s medieval defences), before retiring to the Refectory for more discussion and much needed hot tea!

The Cow Tower, a fourteenth-century brick tower on the bank of the river Wensum.

You can find out more about the history and architecture of Norwich Cathedral on their website – http://www.cathedral.org.uk/historyheritage/

And about the Norwich 12 project here – http://www.norwich12.co.uk/

Dunkirk, Aylsham

This week we did some more fieldwork with the Aylsham Navigation research group – this time investigating the remains of the industrial complex which grew up around the head of the Navigation in Aylsham itself.

Aylsham Mill was rebuilt in 1796 on the site of an earlier mill – some of the building has now been restored and converted into flats, whilst this section awaits further restoration.

We were able to explore the remains of a bone mill, originally built in the 1860s alongside the Navigation. The mill was operated by a steam engine, which also powered the adjacent flour mill (now a garage).

The atmospheric interior was mostly empty, but still contained a number of drive shafts and wheels which drove the machinery.

By leaning precariously out of one of the doors on the first floor we got a good view of the Navigation itself – at this point a straight channel dug out by hand in the 1770s parallel to the River Bure.

The 1880s 25 inch OS map shows the mill complex with the bone mill and corn mill clearly marked. The buildings were once much larger, and included an engine house with a large chimney, now gone.

By the 1900s ranges of stables had been added to the mill complex next to the road, which are still standing on site and which are now used as offices.

Presiding over the mills was the owner’s house, a neat example of Victorian ‘Jacobethan’ domestic architecture.

The site is now surrounded by modern housing and industry, but represents one of the most complete sections of the Navigation with the cut and the associated industrial buildings surviving almost intact, side by side.

Local History in Blo Norton

Yesterday we went along to a local history day in the south Norfolk village of Blo Norton to help support The Little Ouse Headwaters Project.

The valley of the Little Ouse was once an important fenland landscape, with peat diggings and large areas of common grazing. The LOHP project has been working to restore parts of the fens and commons and to manage them sustainably to attract important species (like the raft spider – one of the largest in Britain which thrives in this part of south Norfolk).

Faden’s map of 1797, digitally redrawn by Andrew Macnair, shows the long common along the river valley which joined up with the large common in neighbouring Lopham. Blo Norton Fen was enclosed in the 1820s, although some elements of the fenland landscape remained in the form of fuel allotments for the poor.

One of our undergraduate students, Lucy Willgress, did her final year work placement with the Little Ouse Headwaters project this summer. Lucy researched the changing landscape of the Little Ouse valley, and in particular looked at the some of the fuel allotments created after parliamentary enclosure and how they were managed.

Yesterday Lucy gave a short talk on her work to people from Blo Norton and the surrounding area, and we were then on hand in the afternoon to look at original documents and maps bought along by members of the local community.

This was the first local history day event held by the LOHP team, who were really pleased with the response from the local community – there will almost certainly be more history themed events to follow!

If you’d like to find out more about the Little Ouse Headwaters Project, and how you can get involved their website is here – http://www.lohp.org.uk/

You can explore Andrew Macnair’s redrawn map of Faden here – http://www.fadensmapofnorfolk.co.uk/