The British Association for Local History (BALH) is a national charity which promotes local history throughout the country, supporting local history societies and individual local historians.
In May 2026, BALH announced that their annual Society Newsletter Award was to be awarded to Heanor!
Wow! This was totally unexpected. This isn’t an award which anyone nominates you for. History societies from all around the UK send a copy of their newsletters to BALH for their archive. Some groups produce scholarly journals once or twice a year, while others, like Heanor, publish shorter newsletters on a more regular basis. But from everything received last year by BALH, they have decided that ours is the best.
Several features of the newsletter were singled out for comment. The judges were impressed by the newsletter’s colour and photographs, and specifically picked out a number of oral history articles over the last year. Their conclusion was that “the H&DLHS Newsletter is not only interesting but also fun”. We fully agree with that, and that is how we intend it to remain!
If you are not a regular reader of our newsletter, it is easy to remedy that – it costs just £6 a year (for 9 editions, from September to May) for the email version, or for £15 you can have a paper copy posted to you. See the Membership page for more details.
The newsletter is the work of many people, but special mention must go to the editor, our Chair Clive Booth, whose flair at designing the layout and sorting out suitable images makes the newsletter something special – so special that it wins awards!
The award will be formally presented to the Society at the BALH AGM later in the year.
