Latest news

As part of the Market Garden Heritage project volunteers have started researching different aspects of market gardening, particularly specific parishes or topics. One topic we are interested in is transportation. We know from a previous project about orchard heritage that there was a major logistical infrastructure to move produce from the farms to the cities...

Volunteers contributed 3281 hours (444 days!) last year across the service and provide fantastic help in many different ways. Some have been volunteering with us longer than we can remember and we appreciate them so much. In most cases they are doing ‘value added’ work which we would not be able to do otherwise as part...

We have recently received an interesting deposit and would love to find out more about the owner and whether any of his family are still in the area.   Worcestershire Archive and Archaeology Service have recently received a 1941 Italian copy of Pinocchio from the Fondazione Nazionale Carlo Collodi  that originally belonged to  Doctor Arthur...

Worcestershire Archives and Archaeology Service have been awarded an eighteen month grant by the Wellcome Trust to conserve and catalogue a range of archival collections relating to hospitals, health professionals and associated organisations. The project will build on our previous Wellcome funded project cataloguing, digitising and conserving mental health records from Barnsley Hall and Powick...

We are very lucky in Worcestershire to have a diverse range of ‘Community Halls’ of different dates and character. Studying these small and rather unassuming buildings can better our understanding of communities and how they have changed. The majority of ‘Community Halls’ date from the mid-19th century onwards. Many early examples were constructed as reading...

The Charles Archive, held by Worcestershire Archive & Archaeology Service, contains thousands of individual sketches, drawings, photographs, plans, surveys and reports that relate to the c. 250 buildings, in Worcestershire, that Freddie, Mary and their team of architects, conserved and restored whilst they were in practice.   Thanks to grant funding from Historic England, the...

In Mental Health Awareness Week we look back at the life of the Jane Freeman, nail maker, and her extraordinary resilience in the face of poverty and illness. Here at the archives, we are fortunate to hold records from Powick Hospital, formerly known as Worcester County and Lunatic Asylum, which closed its doors 30 years...

The next of our Explore Archives workshops is all about the Poor Law and Workhouses. It’s a topic that may bring to mind Oliver Twist (although certain details Dickens used were wrong) or you may remember an elderly relative. There were two times of the poor Law, old and new, and we’ll look at what...

There’s a way where you can both support our work and provide a gift to yourself or a friend at the same time. Our Adopt a Document scheme allows you to select and adopt a document, whilst helping with important conservation work. Keith Parsons’ son in law adopted a document on his behalf. Keith is...

In 2018 Historic England funded Worcestershire Archive and Archaeology Service, in partnership with Worcester City Historic Environment Record, to fully catalogue the practice archive of F.W.B and Mary Charles Chartered Architects. A selection of the archive was subsequently digitally captured and the resulting images have been made publicly accessible online.  Now, in 2019, The Vernacular...