Latest news, including Webwatch

For the record
The naturally preserved Iron Age Lindow Man, who was found in a peat bog near Wilmslow, Cheshire, in 1984 is going to be on display at The Manchester Museum from April 2008 until March 2009 and the Museum wants to hear from anyone who has any memories of the events surrounding the discovery and seeing the body when it was displayed in the city in 1987 and 1991. If you can help or would like to know more contact Corinne Leader, Manchester Museum, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, tel: 0161 306 1584, email: corinne.leader@manchester.ac.uk, www.manchester.ac.uk/museum.

Out and About
The Royal Tunbridge Wells Heritage Walking Trail was launched last year to mark the 400th anniversary of the discovery of the Chalybeate Spring by Dudley Lord North in 1606. The discovery of the Spring was fundamental in the birth of Tunbridge Wells and its subsequent development as a favoured resort of the gentry and royalty during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and later in forming the town's character and reputation as a pleasant place to live, work and visit. To celebrate this important event a series of commemorative claret-coloured plaques have been erected to mark buildings of particular significance in the town's history (see photograph of the William Willicombe plaque). The stories behind the individuals featured on the plaques are described and linked together in the form of two trails which can be downloaded from the web at www.visittunbridgewells.com. It is also available, free of charge, from Tourist Information Centre, The Old Fish Market, The Pantiles, Tunbridge Wells, Kent TN2 5TN, tel: 01892 515675.

Webwatch
www.audiotours.net gives you access to a free, downloadable, thirty-three page guide, How to Design, Build and Publish an Audio Tour. The site is part of the ‘Opencommunities’ Project based in Belfast. There is little else available in terms of additional information, but with the increasing popularity of audio guides to accompany visits to museums and other historic sites, there is no technical reason why local history societies cannot compile their own audio guides of local walks, especially with the increasing number of people using MP3 players to play music and podcasts of radio programmes. If you would like to explore the idea further, then this is as good a place to start as any.

www.measuringworth.com is a fascinating discovery, thanks to Sheffield History Reporter (Feb/March 2007), which enables you to enter an amount for any year between 1264 and 2005 and to find out what it was worth in another year which falls in the same period. It isn’t as simple as taking £1, say, in 1959 and finding out what it was worth in 2005, because its value changed at different rates according to the Retail Price Index, Average Pay and Gross Domestic Product, to name just some of the variables you can choose.

www.collectionslink.org.uk is a new national collections advisory service managed by MDA (formerly the Museum Documentation Association) in partnership with The Institute of Conservation and The National Preservation Office, with the deceptively simple aim of ‘providing easy access to guidance and best practice in the care and management of collections’. Its services can be used by local history societies with their own collections to care for. Already, the website contains over 600 downloadable guidelines and fact sheets, with lots more besides. This is the web at its best and this level of information sharing could not be achieved in any other way.

www.movinghistory.ac.uk is a national guide to the twelve regional film and sound archives which has recently added a ‘Home Front’ section to the website. It’s fairly easy to use and there are lots of historic films and clips to choose from. Whilst this website does not attempt to oversell itself in any way, the quality and the size of the images on your computer, even when set to the highest standard, will not occupy much of your computer screen, although as download speeds and computer power increase the images will improve.

www.gazetteer.co.uk contains over 50,000 entries and is invaluable when wanting check the location of a particular place, especially its historic county location. When we started Local History Magazine in 1984 we made the decision to put local historians and societies where they placed themselves, so if someone says their society is in the West Midlands and not Warwickshire, or in London and not Middlesex, then we take their choice of location. However, when making such decisions it is important that you know why someone else may well disagree with you. An invaluable site which is managed by the Association of British Counties (see next listing).

www.abcounties.co.uk is the website of the Association of British Counties, a society dedicated to promoting awareness of the continuing importance of the 86 historic (or traditional) counties of Great Britain. The Association contends that Britain needs a fixed popular geography rooted in history, public understanding and commonly held notions of cultural identity, such as the old system of counties. Whilst I understand what ABC wants to achieve, some of the metropolitan counties created in 1974 reflected a changed cultural identity which continues to this day, especially in the West Midlands and South Yorkshire. Their arguments for change, however, are persuasive and, as someone who always refers to Wembley as being in Middlesex and still supports the county’s cricket team when they take on my adopted county of Nottinghamshire, I can only wish their campaign every success.

www.gbhgis.org is managed by the Department of Geography at Portsmouth University and is described as ‘a unique digital collection of information about Britain’s localities as they have changed over time’. It is linked to another website, www.VisionOfBritain.org.uk, called ‘Vision of Britain Through Time’ where you can type in a place name and gain access to all kinds of historical information. The historic maps for several locations I looked at were not as clear in showing ‘boundaries’ as the accompanying text suggests, nonetheless it’s a potentially useful research aid for many local historians. Portsmouth University’s Historical GIS Project has recently received £398,700 to fund the creation of computer based maps showing British Parliamentary Constituency boundaries from before the First Reform Act of 1831/2 to between 1954 and 1974, after which date computerised maps already exist. The maps will be linked to election results covering the same period as the historic Parliamentary boundary was in use, but none of this information is expected to be online before 2009.