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This is the fourth in a series of blog posts celebrating the life and work of timber-frame building specialists FWB ‘Freddie’ and Mary Charles. Funded by Historic England, the ‘Charles Archive’ project aims to digitise and make more accessible the Charles collection. In this piece we will be looking at a building (or part-building) that...

Our archives contain over 12 miles of shelving with thousands of boxes. These boxes contain all sorts of stories, and can be the inspiration for all sorts of creative writing. Various films, TV dramas, books and plays have used archives and the stories they contain as their basis, and we are keen to encourage people...

In 1990, the Worcestershire Record Office began offering an in-house microfilming service to those individuals and organisations wishing to have surrogates of archive materials in filmic form. Not only did this improve the accessibility of those archives, it also helped to preserve the original material. As the decade moved on and the photographic world became...

Another four test pits were recently excavated in the small Worcestershire village of White Ladies Aston, as part of the HLF funded Small Pits, Big Ideas project we’re running on behalf of Worcestershire Archaeological Society. So, what did we find this time? As with those dug last autumn, all test pits were excavated by Looked...

  Roman street food? Perhaps. We’ve been experimenting with a reconstruction of an unusual oven found during The Hive excavation to see how and what the people of Worcester ate in Roman times. Before The Hive was built, an extensive excavation took place. Fragments from a number of unusual prefabricated Roman ovens were found, one...

Forthcoming Events We have a range of events coming up, including as part of the Lost Landscapes project, many of which have been arranged since our events leaflet came out in January. WWI Talk Thu 17 May 6-8pm Dr Adrian Gregson, our Collections Manager, will talk about his new book about a territorial battalion during...

  Re-using some of the actual images created and used by Whinfield, for public display around The Hive, is one of the ways we are making the collection more visible, emanating out from the building that holds the originals in a dark basement. Presenting them again in projected form, in two windows at The Hive...

  Bone ice skates? Yes, these really were a thing in medieval times. During a small monitoring project undertaken last month in a Worcestershire village, a worked bone turned up in a medieval pit. It looks suspiciously like an ice skate. Or at least one in progress. Helpfully for us, a selection of 12th to...

This is the third in a series of blog posts celebrating the life and work of timber-frame building specialists FWB ‘Freddie’ and Mary Charles. Funded by Historic England, the ‘Charles Archive’ project aims to digitise and make more accessible the Charles collection.   Freddie Charles found himself teaching architecture at the University of Birmingham after...

Parish Registers are a well used part of our collections, perhaps our most commonly used, being a key source of personal details for family historians. Everyday you can see people browsing them on microfilms here in The Hive. However whilst these are important, there is far much more to parish records than just the registers,...