Heanor & District Local History

May 2008
(Move to the next section for a general introduction to the site.)

A new page this month on the War Memorials of Heanor Grammar (Secondary) School. Please visit it, and also let us know of any other indoor war memorials in the area, especially those in places other than churches and chapels. If you can send us a photograph, all the better.

Please see our full programme for the season - 2007/8 Programme. If you're local, we'd love to see you at one of our meetings! The last indoor meeting of the season is on 13 May, when Robert Mee gives a talk on the History of Heanor Grammar School, 1893 - 1976. The Society's book on the same subject will be available by the end of May - keep checking this site for details on how to order it. In June and July there will be visits to Darley Abbey and to the National Coal Mining Museum.

The 2008/9 Programme is now also available. Next season will see the Society's 40th Anniversary, so we are pleased to have been able to put together a programme with such a local emphasis. The newsletter page has also now been fully updated, having fallen quite a bit behind. The last two years' newsletters have not yet been indexed (hopefully this will be done later in the year), so until then this is the only way to find out what you have missed.

There are just a few copies (less than a half a dozen) of Life in Old Heanor available so now is really your last chance to buy one - it is unlikely to be reprinted. Local History books often rise in value once they are out of print (there is a paperback book on Codnor and Loscoe which has been seen advertised on Amazon at £97.25!), so you can expect to pay a lot more in the future if you want a copy. Our major publication of 2004, A Portrait of Heanor, is still available, but this is another book which is not likely to be reprinted once it is sold out.

When the Aristoc page was published in November 2006, we asked for the names of two of the three girls featured in one of the photos. We have now had their names given to us - one is definite, the other a little less so. We are always keen to hear from anyone who can help us with information about anything we publish.

An excellent website was launched on 17 October. StLawrenceonline.com is Heanor church's own website, and has a huge section on the history of the church. A large amount of work has gone into this project, and they are to be congratulated on the finished product! It is intended that further additions will be made, so please give it a visit!

We're still working on a couple of new pages for the site. The latest addition was a new page on Vic Hallam's, one of the biggest employers in the area during the late 20th century. There are also two further photographs the Churches and Chapels page. If you are a member of any of the local churches, we would love to hear any of your group's history. Please contact us. Equally, send us any of your own memoirs of anything to do with the area, whether you remember the 1920's or the 1980's - it is all just as valid! You can write a whole article, or just send us a few notes - they can normally be turned into an article, either for our newsletter or as a starting-point for a web page.

The full index to the Society's newsletters, from 1970 to 2006, is now available on-line, as well as in a paper format. Click here for the link to the document. This same page also has an interesting photograph of a gypsy caravan at Langley Mill.

A book was published (not by the Society) earlier in 2007, which will be of interest to many from the area. "Aldercar - The Story of a School," by Mary and John Sheppard, details the history of the first 50 years of Heanor Aldercar Secondary School, now Aldercar Community Language College. At just £10.00, it is a must for anyone interested in local education, and contains much information which would otherwise have been lost. It is available at local stockists, or you can order it via the usual internet sources at a premium. Its ISBN is 0-9554746-0-5. The Society also has a supply, available at cost plus postage - contact us if you are interested in buying a copy.

In the four years that this site has been on the world wide web, over 120,000 visits have been made, with a total of over a quarter of a million page-views. Not bad for a site covering a small market town in Derbyshire! A large number of emails are received each month - some are dealt with very quickly, others need a bit of time to think about! But please get in touch if there is anything that you feel you can add.

Welcome

... to the pages of the
Heanor and District Local History Society.

Heanor (in case you are just browsing and don't actually know) is a market town in Derbyshire, England, very close to the border with Nottinghamshire. Not a major tourist area, but we are here to celebrate our history and heritage, which is as strong as anyone's!

We hope you will find our site both interesting and informative. This site is under constant change - most pages stay the same, but almost every month there are new additions, and eventually some items will also disappear.

Please keep coming back to see what changes we have made. If you've not visited for a while, have a look at the What's New page, where we keep a running log of changes made to the site.

The British Library have included this website in a national archive of "selected key UK websites - ensuring that invaluable scholarly, cultural and scientific resources remain available for future generations." There are currently only some 600 websites in their archive, so we are rather honoured at being asked!

In September 2006, research was published into the "most English" places in the country, based primarily on the analysis of names in the most recent census, which split the country's population into 200 ethnic groups. Heanor was declared the second-most English town in the country, after nearby Ripley, with almost 90% of the population being English in origin. Third came Sutton-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, and Boston in Lincolnshire came fourth. Whatever your views on what this means, at least it got the town's name mentioned!