Celebrating our collections dating from 780AD to the present day
By Summer Parker, volunteer, and Alice Millard, archivist MGM 2/3, prospectuses, 1884-1891 In late 2024, the archive of the Marine and General Mutual Life Assurance Society was catalogued and made accessible to researchers. This project was made possible by a grant awarded by Lloyds Register Foundation. Known as MGM, the company was founded in London…
Continue reading ➞ Life and Death at Sea: Marine and General Mutual
By Tim Hudson, guest speaker What is the largest building in Chichester after the cathedral? Most residents will know County Hall, tucked away behind West Street. A public right of way runs past it; and whenever a news item about the County Council appears in the press it is likely to be accompanied by a…
Continue reading ➞ Tuesday Talk – County Hall and its architect
By Alan Green, Guest Speaker Visually Chichester did not alter substantially under the Victorians, so its character remained – and remains to this day - essentially Georgian. PH 12594 - Chichester: East Street and the Cross In this illustrated talk Alan Green explores the Victorian era in Chichester including the coming of the railway, new…
Continue reading ➞ Tuesday Talk: What did the Victorians do for Chichester?
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 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…
Ian Everest - Guest Speaker Some forty years ago Ian Everest started out on the journey of researching his family history and just like many others who embark on the same path, his life has never been the same since! It brought about change of career into an occupation which was directly related to his…
Continue reading ➞ Tuesday Talk: The Women’s Land Army – a Sussex connection
By Dr Sue Berry FSA, FRHistS - guest speaker Gravetye Manor, GM, the estate of William Robinson who made his money from writing about gardens, and shaped public taste. This talk is about the small country leisure house estates established in the Weald of Sussex between about 1840 - 1914 (during the reigns of Queen…
By Caroline Walker, Guest Speaker This autumn the West Sussex Record Office is celebrating the life and work of Sussex-born artist MacDonald Gill. 'Max' - as he was known to friends and family - was an architect, mural painter, letterer, and graphic artist in the first half of the 20th Century, best known for his…
By Hamish MacGillivray, freelance heritage consultant Anyone for tennis? During the autumn of 2019 I spent many wow moments in the WSRO reading room discovering forgotten stories about Highdown Gardens and its original owners. Did you know that Highdown Gardens started because of a tennis court in 1909? New plants were purchased by Sir Frederick…
Continue reading ➞ The Remarkable Research Journey for Highdown Gardens
By Kim Leslie (with an Introduction by Nichola Court) In his first blog, Kim Leslie introduced us to some of his more colourful ancestors, whose lives – at times, dramatic - are revealed in his family papers – The Corfield Papers. In his second blog, Kim focuses on his grandfather, Dr Carruthers Corfield, whose papers…
Continue reading ➞ THE CORFIELD PAPERS – A New Accession: Part Two
West Sussex Record Office 