Living on the Edge project

Living on the Edge
This is our Much Wenlock Social History Project.

Project Background

Much Wenlock Museum is situated in the Memorial Hall which is owned by Much Wenlock Town Council and leased on a 21 year lease to Shropshire County Council to house a museum and Visitor Information Centre. The management and staffing of the museum is funded by the County Council as part of the County Museum Service. The management and staffing of the Visitor Information Centre is also funded by the County Council as part of the Library Service.

The museum and Visitor Information Centre is ideally placed to act as an introduction to the town and its rich history for visitors to the town. In 2004 the Friends of Much Wenlock Museum was formed to support the work of the museum service and, in particular, to help develop the museum as a community facility.

Although a local history is the focus of the museum it also has two internationally important stories to tell; the founding of the modern Olympic movement and the contribution of local rocks to development of modern geology. With so much to tell and only a limited space available within the museum, the Friends started to look for a way in which they could help to both increase the amount of interpretation about the town’s history available to both local residents and visitors to the town and to encourage the local community to contribute to this story with their own memories and heirlooms. With this aim in mind the Friends of Much Wenlock Museum created the concept of the Digital History Bank.

The problem -

Much Wenlock is a town with a wealth of history dating back as far as Roman times. It also has an important natural heritage from its internationally important geology to the wide range of habitats present today along Wenlock Edge. The Town’s museum, which is actively supported by our group, collects and interprets this rich heritage for the local community and tourists visiting the town. However, due to the nature of museum collecting, pieces of this jigsaw are not represented in the museum’s collections.

Over the years many people have uncovered a wide range of aspects of this story through research or personal collecting. However, this information is scattered across the county and beyond in private collections. This project aims to bring this privately held material into the public domain by creating a virtual history bank. Private individuals can add virtual records of their collections, photographs and research to this bank for everyone to enjoy and learn from. This bank will help to create a more complete interpretation of the town’s rich history.

What we plan to do -

The Local History Bank will be a web based resource which will be available to on-line viewers 24 hours a day. The virtual collection held in the bank will be themed so people can explore various aspects of the town’s history. This resource will sit alongside a countywide Heritage Lottery project which will be undertaken by Shropshire County Council to digitise the museum’s catalogue, the County SMR and records held at Shropshire Archives. These two partner projects will be linked so that users can search across both publicly and privately held records. This approach will also allow savings to be made on website development and design by using the same template database to create both websites.

How we will do it -

The group will contact local individuals and groups to conduct an audit to ascertain what material is available. Records held by the museum will also help to identify private collectors and amateur historians. The project will also contact other heritage professionals for support such as the county’s Finds Liaison Officer to make links with metal detectorists working in the area.

Open days will also be arranged where people can bring material to be added to the history bank. These will be themed to encourage people to share stories and similar interests.

This project will:
1. Make previously inaccessible material available to all
2. It will improve the interpretation of Much Wenlock’s history
3. It will help to identify what aspects of the town’s past are not recorded and should be actively researched in the future
4. It will value and celebrate the contribution local people can make to telling the story of their home.
5. It will explore the history of Much Wenlock in new and imaginative ways.

Funded by LHI