Archive

One of the documents which we have in our display cabinets in our strongrooms is a relatively recent addition to our collection. A couple of years ago we acquired a Commission of Array for the City of Worcester dated 14 September 1642, which was just as the first military actions of the Civil War were...

  Driving over the bridge into Evesham you pass asparagus fields – a small remnant of the market gardening industry that thrived in the Vale of Evesham until the mid-20th century. A new project exploring and celebrating the market gardening heritage in the Vale is now underway and looking for volunteers. The key focus of...

Our Explore the Past guide frequently attracts positive feedback from users, including Roger Leake, Chairman of the Friends of Worcestershire Archives. Read about Roger’s experience of using it in this post. We published our Explore the Past guide a while ago to give people far and wide a helping hand with getting started with researching...

In the eighteenth century Worcester had a wide variety of shops and evidence has been found to show that this included fashionable toy shops. Here we explore a little bit more about where these shops were located in the city. What we think of as toy shops now are very different to what they were...

Happy New Year! We know this is a time when many people are looking at doing something new or picking up something they started but had to put on hold. Family and house history are amongst these things and each January we have people coming to The Hive asking us how to begin their search,...