Heanor & District Local History Society

Welcome to our NEW site

February 2015

(Last updated on 13 February 2015)

News (for general introduction, see below)

Another new page has now been added - Heanor from Above. Using aerial photographs from the Britain from Above website, each photo linked to the original so that you can zoom in on the features, we have included the best photos of the Heanor, Langley Mill, Smalley and Shipley areas. (Sorry, there are none we can find from Codnor or Loscoe).

And there’s now a new Questionnaire in our “We want your memories” feature. This time we are asking you to recall what you can about going to the fair - whether at Heanor, or at one of the smaller travelling fairgrounds which operated in the area. Thanks to all those who have completed our previous questionnaires - responses will continue to be collated, and, once we have sufficient, we will turn your memories into an item for our newsletter or website.

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.

If you haven’t yet seen them, there have been a number of new pages recently - Marlpool Cemetery, the Suffragette movement, and questionnaires asking for your own memories of the area.

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 March. 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 March meeting will look at Medieval Farming and the Laxton Open-Field System, and Stuart Rose will describe the system still used in this Nottinghamshire village, but which used to be in practice everywhere. 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!