Celebrating our collections dating from 780AD to the present day
By Alice Millard, Project Archivist After a year of cataloguing, the Crawley New Town archive is now available to the public at West Sussex Record Office. It is the first time these 3000+ records have been fully accessible, and researchers can search the catalogue online via our website. So, what's in the archive? The nucleus…
Continue reading ➞ Cataloguing Crawley New Town: The Catalogue is Live!
By Dr Caroline Adams - Guest Speaker In the late 16th century, the estimated population of Chichester was about 4000 residents (now it’s about 33,000). Four thousand is about the same population as some of the present-day villages around Chichester – Tangmere or Fishbourne, for example. When you walk around those villages, it feels quite…
Continue reading ➞ Tuesday Talk: The material culture of life in Elizabethan Chichester
By Victoria Evans, Searchroom Archivist At the end of this blog, please find an update containing my thoughts on the film and comparisons to the real-life case. With the upcoming release of ‘Wicked Little Letters’ set for the 23rd of February; we thought it best to delve into the true backstory of this poison-pen case…
By Alice Millard, archivist Toussaint Louverture on horseback, 1802, anon. The Met. Before Haiti was so named it was called Saint Domingue, having been colonised by the Spanish in the 15th century then controlled by the French in the 17th century. As with most other Caribbean islands at the time, Saint Domingue's economy was dependent…
Continue reading ➞ The Mysterious Truth of Toussaint Louverture Jr in Chichester
By Victoria Evans, Searchroom Archivist Sunset over Cavendish Street, taken by author Having moved to Chichester recently to take up the role of Searchroom Archivist at the West Sussex Record Office, I have been developing my different branches of research that our researchers utilise. Although doing such exercises enables me to provide a better service,…
Continue reading ➞ A Brief History of Cavendish Street – using maps
By Victoria Evans, Searchroom Archivist In the 1940s two sisters, Amy and Nellie Scaddan, evacuated to the safety of the Petworth countryside from Portsmouth. Although it was more commonplace for children to be evacuated, these sisters were most likely in their 40s during this time and also wanted to take refuge somewhere that would not…
Continue reading ➞ A Wartime Christmas in the Petworth Countryside
By Chris Olver, Project Archivist The 1st of December is World AIDS Day, the international day dedicated to raising awareness of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. This year marks the 36th World AIDS Day since it was launched by the World Health Organisation in 1988. To commemorate this year’s World AIDS Day, our Project Archivist, Chris Olver,…
By Catherine Tite, Volunteer Over the course of 2023, many volunteers devote their time to listing and cataloguing the collections of West Sussex Record Office (WSRO). Catherine, a regular volunteer, recently completed a project to do this with the papers, notes and photographs of former Bognor Regis and Barnham resident Edmond Martin Venables. An amateur…
Continue reading ➞ West Sussex Polymath: Edmond Martin Venables 1901-1990
By Alan Green - Guest Speaker In this talk local historian and author Alan Green will, with the aid of Stella Palmer’s slides and some others, take you on a tour of the city as it was fifty years ago; a city preparing for pedestrianisation but still ruled by the motor car. You will see…
By Chris Olver, Project Archivist In this post, our project archivist documenting HIV and AIDS archives in the UK gives a short tour of some of the online HIV/AIDS archives in the UK. This is second blog in a series and the first part can be found here. In the course of my work so…
Continue reading ➞ New ways of seeing: independent HIV and AIDS web-based archives
West Sussex Record Office 