Latest news

We come up to date with our look back at 50 years of County Archaeologists in Worcestershire with Victoria Bryant. Victoria took over from Malcolm Atkin as Head of Worcestershire Historic Environment & Archaeology Service and oversaw the merger with Worcestershire Record Office and the move to The Hive. I joined Worcestershire County Council in...

The 3rd set of letters of Bert Clements letters cover early 1916. Twenty-one letters by Gunner Bert Clements of Kidderminster are here in the archives, providing one man’s perspective on the war. They were read by Naomi Taylor for the Worcestershire World War One Hundred project to make them more accessible, and we are combining...

We are looking for a volunteer to join our Redditch Military Tribunal project which will start in January 2020, supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund to conclude our WW100 work. This project will carry out research into the records of the Military Service Tribunals held in Redditch during the First World War. Redditch Tribunal...

A lump of rusty old iron – nothing to write home about, or is it? Unlike copper and bronze, iron quickly rusts and easily distorts beyond recognition. With the recent discovery of Iron Age ironwork at a site south of Worcester, we thought it was time to explore the tricky topic of identifying iron artefacts....

Within our collections we have many wonderful images. Some of these we share on social media and, unsurprisingly, they are a big hit with lots of re-shares, likes and comments. Other images you may have found yourself  when you used our collections at The Hive . On our Website we now have an image gallery....

A journey, this time one of work not leisure is the diary of the voyage from Antwerp to San Francisco and back to England by the sailing ship ‘James Kerr’ between 1901 and 1902 written by W. G. Bennett of Edelston, Battenhall Road, Worcester. This ship was built in 1892 by T. Royden & Sons,...

In the display cabinets on level 2 we’re featuring the Civil War in Worcestershire from across our collections and services. Worcestershire is heavily linked to the Civil War, with the first skirmish taking place at Powick, and the final battle fought here in 1651. Worcester was besieged several times, and Charles I visited the city...

Malcolm was County Archaeologist for 16 years, 1993-2009, and he shares his memories with us. I arrived in 1993 and had the privilege of being the last County Archaeologist of the old county of Herefordshire and Worcestershire and the first of the reborn Worcestershire. A lot of time was spent managing this huge change but...

We continue resharing the letters of Gunner Bert Clements, read by Naomi Taylor. They are a collection of letters sent home from the trenches by Bert, and which were later deposited in the archives. They give the insights of one soldier out of millions who served in the war. We originally put them out over...

As we prepare to mark Remembrance Day, 100 years after the first one, we thought we’d share this clip from an interview with Winifred Barber. In it she recalls the very first Remembrance Day, when she went into Birmingham to join many others in marking the day on 11th November 1919. The interview recently came...