Heanor & District Local History Society

Welcome to our NEW site

January 2015!

(Last updated on 24 January 2015)

News (for general introduction, see below)

After several months of work, our conversion of the website is now complete - anything you find wrong with the site now is not because it is in the middle of being changed! Please let us know if you find anything amiss - there definitely will be things which have been missed in all the changes.

We have added a couple of new pages during the process, on the Suffragette movement, and on our requests for your memories of the area; we have also added a search facility on the site. Most of the remaining pages retain the original text and photos, but there have been some new photos added. We have totally revamped the Useful links page, and would be grateful for further suggestions.

New Year - New Logo: the observant amongst you will have spotted a new design of the logo in our header - if you want to see a larger copy, go to The Society page and click on it there.

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!

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!

We hope you will find our site both interesting and informative. We aim for the site to undergo regular changes - most pages stay the same, but new additions come along (we hope) quite often, and eventually some items will also disappear. So 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 Society's interests extend well beyond this immediate area, and covers all the old Heanor Urban District Council area (including Langley Mill, Loscoe and Codnor), along with Shipley and Smalley.

© Except where otherwise stated, the contents of this website are copyright of the Heanor and District Local History Society. If you want to use anything you find here, please ask - the chances are we won't mind.

Where items have not been prepared by the Society itself, we would like to thank the owners of copyright of the images and items used on this site for granting us the necessary permissions for their use. In some cases, despite our best efforts we have not always been able to locate the copyright holders. If you believe that any rights that are yours have inadvertently been infringed, we would ask you to contact us and to accept our apologies.

The Society is a registered charity. We are non-profit making, and all money we receive is ploughed back into preserving and promoting the past of the Heanor area -  this website, our Heritage Centre, our publications, talks and displays, are all examples of our work. If you would like to assist us, please leave us a donation, large or small, by clicking on the button above - all transactions are administered safely and securely by PayPal.

In the eleven years that this site has been on the world wide web, over 370,000 visits have been made, with over 800,000 page-views. Not bad for a site covering a small market town in Derbyshire! A 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.

We are always keen to hear people’s memories of Heanor - just send us a few notes and who knows, it could develop into a whole new page on the website, or an article in one of our newsletters.

The 2015 Calendar is still available, but there are not many left - click on the link for more details.

Then and Now (Part One) - The Changing Face of Heanor Town Centre  is available from the Society and from a number of local stockists. We hope to start working on Part Two shortly!

In case you missed it, there was a short article broadcast on BBC Radio Derby in November about the renaming of the King of Prussia pub - you can listen to it by following the link.

On the slideshow below, you can click on any of the photographs for a larger image.

New Page added on 12 January - Marlpool Cemetery. Some of this was on our old Heritage Centre page, which was removed during the conversion, but much of it, and most of the photographs, are new to the site.

Please let us know of any subjects you would like to see us cover - better still, send us an article, or just a few brief notes, and we will see whether we can turn this into an item for the website.

Our next meeting is on Tuesday 10 February. We meet at the Wilmot Street Centre, Heanor, at 7.30pm on the second Tuesday of each month from September to May (if you don’t know where this is, there is a map on the Contact page). The February meeting is entitled The Story of Boots, and Chris Weir will look at the national, but nevertheless local, company’s history. As with all our meetings, entry is free - we will, of course, try to persuade to to become a member, or to buy a raffle ticket, but there is no commitment - everybody is welcome!