Heanor & District Local History

January 2014
(Move to the next section for a general introduction to the site.)

The Society wishes a Happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year to all our members and visitors.

NEW - We still have a few calendars available - you can buy yours, at the fantastic price of just £3.00, from several local stockists, or at any of our meetings. This year, for those who live further afield, we have also included the option of buying direct from the website, though postage is extra. Please see the Calendar page for more details.

Our 2013 meetings start on Tuesday 14 January, when Adrian Farmer shows us A View from the Train - Derby to Matlock, and on 11 February we will delve into family history: Stephen Flinders will be looking at The Life and Travels of Robert Bruce Napoleon Walker. Everyone is welcome to any of our meetings - you don't need to be a member to attend. Just come along to the Wilmot Street Community Centre ready for a 7.30pm start (so get there around 7.15pm). Our full programme for the year can be seen at Programme 2012/13. We hope that there is something for everyone.

We are still working on creating a "new improved" website. The existing site will continue to be updated until the new one is ready, but there are unlikely to be any major new pages until the refurbished site comes along. In the meantime though, we also hope to keep adding bits and pieces to our Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/HeanorLocalHistory), so please visit us and like us!

The Heritage Corner at the Heanor Antique Centre is open for visitors, another way in which the Society ensures that our local history is not forgotten. The Heritage Corner is open whenever the Antiques Centre is open (daily, 10.30am - 4.30pm). 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.

Our Publications Group is working on a number of different projects at present, with timescales which vary from a few months to several years. We know that not all of them will come to fruition, but we are equally willing to listen to anyone who has a project of their own and who is looking for someone to publish it. (As long as it is to do with the history of Heanor!!!!)

In the nine years that this site has been on the world wide web, over 200,000 visits have been made, with over half a million 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.

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 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." Out of the hundreds of thousands of UK websites out there, only a tiny proportion are - only 10 are concerned with local history - 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!