Heanor & District Local History

June 2009
(Move to the next section for a general introduction to the site.)

After five years without a Heritage Centre, we are pleased to announce that, until we can find a new centre of our own, we have been given a display section in the Heanor Antiques Centre (the former Machin and Hartwell's). The Heritage Corner will be formally opened at 2pm on Sunday 14 June 2009. The display will be open whenever the Antiques Centre is open (daily, 10.30am - 4.30pm), and on two afternoons a week members of the Society will be there to answer any queries. We are grateful to Jane Richards for allowing us this display.

For more information about the Heritage Corner, follow the link. And for details of the Heanor Antiques Centre, go to their website.

Another new page this month continues the theme of churches and places of worship. The Kingdom Hall of Jehovah's Witnesses at Langley Mill was built in 36 hours in the mid-1980s. But do you remember the building which stood there before?

We will soon be advertising two new items for sale. Our next publication is due out in July/August, and is a booklet, by John Bennett, on the Heanor & District Omnibus Company - more information to follow.

And at the request of visitors to this site who live too far from Heanor to be able to attend out meetings, we are going to release CD slideshows of some of our talks (this will be a fairly restricted number). The first two (and only two so far) to be recorded are the "Mine's a Pint" talk, on the history of pubs in the area, and the "Forty Glorious Years" talk in May. We just need to work out a few technical issues, and then they will be made available. (Hopefully by September)

Our season of talks has now finished for the summer. We start again on Tuesday 8 September with a talk by Linda Salt on "200 Years at Denby Pottery" The full 2009/10 Programme is available (though it may be subject to slight changes), so have a look and make a few dates in your diary!

The Society's eighth publication, 'Follow the Master': A History of Heanor Grammar School, 1893 - 1976, was published on 27 May. The book details the 83 years of the life of the town's most prestigious school, but, unlike some school histories, it is not aimed solely at reawakening the memories of those who attended. The book is a warts and all study of the school, from its earliest days as a District Technical School, through to its closure under the comprehensive system. Orders will normally be processed within three days of payment, Credit/debit card orders can be made via PayPal - follow the link above.

Our major publication of 2004, A Portrait of Heanor, is also still available, but this is a book which is not likely to be reprinted once it is sold out. 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.

In the four years that this site has been on the world wide web, over 150,000 visits have been made, with a total of over a third 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!