For the third year February half term in Worcester was #loveworcester. It is a festival arranged by members of the Worcester Heritage Partnership, which is a group of heritage venues in the city who meet to discuss ways to work together for mutual benefit.
It was decided that February half term was a great opportunity to badge events under a single banner, and with Valentines Day being in the period the word Love was an obvious candidate for the job.
Most events are ones we would be doing anyway, and the title or focus were skewed (some tenuously!) to fit the theme. There is no external money for this, apart from a little bit from the Museum Development Officer, and each partner contributed a small amount for producing a brochure. The local tourism body helped by providing support and publicising events on their website.
By all working together we were able to maximise publicity, ensuring that it was mentioned in the media, and on social media we all shared/retweeted each other and promoted heavily so people were well aware of the festival, which helped the individual events.
In our service we have run a few events. Our workshop on parish records was specifically run that week with the title ‘Love and death in the archives’, and in addition to the usual content I’d cover I made sure that stories of strange weddings are included.
We try to do children’s event too. Last year we asked them to draw their favourite Worcester building, whilst having photos from our collections to inspire them, and were pleased that The Hive (our new home) was a firm favourite with our young users. This year we have a day of archaeological activities, and a day of events around Dandy Row.
Dandy Row is a group of houses which has gripped the imagination of our staff since we discovered this fantastically named row of houses near the cathedral. Since then we have been looking out references to it and the residents within our collections. Using census, photos, newspapers, school records, wills, trade directories, maps, WWI records, and local history books we uncovered the story of residents who sounded as if they could have come straight from the pages of a Dickens novel, such as
- Isaac Webb – Waterloo veteran & salmon fisherman of the ship Enterprise
- Mrs Tandy – washwoman
- John Bayliss – Royal Worcester Porcelain painter
- Jermiah Pitt – labourer
- Henry Martin – soldier
- John Howell – publican
Other residents covered the main local industries of gloving, railways and porcelain, allowing us to tell those stories of Worcester’s past.
We borrowed object of an appropriate age to go alongside with the information we had gathered, and someone even put some of it together for a story for the Saturday storytime in the library. The children and families loved it, and we also had older people visit who could remember the street. In many ways Dandy Row is just a random collection of houses, which could be anywhere, but it was great to be able to use the sources to bring these people to life to showcase what could be discovered here. Love Worcester was then an appropriate opportunity to share what we’d discovered and share with visitors.
CILIP Local Studies Group 