Celebrating our collections dating from 780AD to the present day
Each development corporation managing the building of a new town produced a master plan. This document, or documents, outlined the vision for the new town and went into detail about the provision for housing, amenities, shops, schools and leisure places. Accompanying the documents were a series of large scale planning maps which visualised aspects of…
Continue reading ➞ Cataloguing Crawley New Town: The Master Plan(s) and Planner(s)
By Nichola Court, Archivist Shippams 4/1/2, detail from price list (c1965) Diary extract recording work carried out and weather conditions, October 1976 (catalogue reference Peter Bailey 3/1/2) On 10th June, Explore Your Archives will be celebrating business records. West Sussex Record Office holds the records of many of our county's businesses, from farms to estate…
Continue reading ➞ Brilliant business records: an update on the Shippam’s collection
By Nick Corbo-Stewart, Volunteer Co-ordinator and Archivist Volunteers hard at work in the Record Office searchroom This week is National Volunteers' Week and we're taking this opportunity to celebrate the contribution volunteers from the local community make; their hard work has a hugely positive impact on the services the Record Office provides to its researchers.…
Continue reading ➞ National Volunteers’ Week 2023: Volunteers at West Sussex Record Office
By Alice Millard, project archivist Behind the development of Crawley New Town was a phenomenal group of people. As well as the ten or so members of the executive committee, there were more than 100 employees across planning, estate, legal, administrative, financial and housing departments. These employees were some of the best architects, engineers, town…
Continue reading ➞ Cataloguing Crawley New Town: The Team Behind the Corp.
By Matthew Jones, Assistant County Archivist If you're someone who enjoys researching your family history, there is a huge amount of archive material available at West Sussex Record Office and it's not unusual for people to trace their roots back to the 1700s or earlier still. Boys at The Lancastrian School, Chichester, 1914 (WSRO E35/19/20)…
By Alice Millard, project archivist With funding granted by the Wellcome Trust, nine organisations across England, Wales, and Ireland have embarked upon a major project to catalogue and make accessible the archives of 11 post-war new towns. These new towns are Basildon, Bracknell, Crawley, Cwmbran, Newton Aycliffe, Peterlee, Redditch, Runcorn, Shannon, Stevenage and Warrington. WSRO…
Continue reading ➞ Cataloguing Crawley New Town: What is a ‘new town’?
With May's Coronation on the horizon, a first for many in the country, it seems only fitting we look back through the years and see how the County celebrated the formal accession of King Charles' mother, Queen Elizabeth II, and his grandfather, King George VI. To help mark this occasion, West Sussex Record Office and…
Continue reading ➞ West Sussex Unwrapped IV: A County Celebrates – Coronations Past and Present
By Chris Olver, Project Archivist Until 2020, many people living in the United Kingdom had not experienced living through a pandemic. In a bid to understand Covid-19, many media outlets drew comparisons to the Great Influenza epidemic of 1918-1920, yet it was a pandemic from more recent history which showed how an emerging disease could…
By Nichola Court, Archivist This International Women’s Day 2023, we celebrate the achievements of the Chichester-born suffrage campaigner, Ethel Margaret ‘Madge’ Turner, a woman who spent her adult life campaigning for equity and whose efforts to achieve this have recently been recognised in the city of her birth. The Market House (Butter Market) in North…
By Abigail Hartley, Searchroom Archivist West Sussex County Council Logo It’s hard to miss the numerous badges and arms of a blue shield with yellow birds dotted around West Sussex. You may be surprised to learn, however, that no English county had any arms officially granted to it until after the 1889 Local Government Act.…
Continue reading ➞ Sussex Coat of Arms: Martlets (not) in Flight
West Sussex Record Office 