Celebrating our collections dating from 780AD to the present day
By Alice Millard and Abigail Hartley We are beginning a brand new blog project, which will continue over the next year or so on this page. We hope to have each member of staff talk about their role in the Record Office to reveal what it is we do, and why we do what we do. First…
Continue reading ➞ A Day in the Life of…A Searchroom Archivist
It's a year of important anniversaries for World War Two, as later in September it will be 80 years since the start of the war, and, of course, the 75th Anniversary of the D-Day landings is also upon us. It is only fitting, therefore, that the Record Office will be highlighting our fantastic Second World War records throughout the year. To help commemorate, let's look at one of our most impressive photographic collections - L'Alouette.
Alan Green ‘If you can remember the 1960s you weren’t there” runs a well-known maxim. Whether you were there or not, it was a decade irredeemably associated with permissive attitudes and the ripping out of the hearts of so many towns and cities in the name of modernisation, often as a result of dodgy dealings…
Continue reading ➞ Sense or Insensibility : Chichester in the 1960’s
Chosen by Andrew Rackley, member of staff Archives aren’t all about paper. Technology has changed significantly over the last 70 years and the Record Office has been changing with it. As records are increasingly produced solely in a digital format (‘born-digital’), the content held here increasingly goes beyond what you might think of as traditional…
Continue reading ➞ Billingshurst Oral History Project collection, 2015 (Acc 18164)
Chosen by James Gaffney, member of staff This is the original Master Plan for Crawley New Town, one of eight new ‘satellite’ towns created by the Government in the late 1940s on the outskirts of London. The aim of these new towns was to encourage people to relocate from an over-crowded capital, which had been…
Continue reading ➞ The Birth of Crawley; Master plan for Crawley New Town, 1947 (Par 60/26/4)
West Sussex Record Office 