A phrase that is often used as is ‘you can never go back’. Well recently I have been putting this to the test whilst working on a new book. It’s a in ‘Then and Now’ photographic series and so I’ve been out taking photographs of Trowbridge from the same viewpoint as those taken 60 to 120 years ago. I was born in the town but haven’t lived there for 20 years and I’m seeing the town as it is now, as I remember it in the 1950s and ‘60s, and as it was in the early 20^th century.

 
None of the buildings in this picture from the 1880s of Stallard Street and the Town Bridge in Trowbridge are standing today. Although Bridge House on the right is still standing the bays in the picture are not as they were destroyed by a bomb in the Second World War.

We all realise that the pace of change has been far greater over the last few decades than ever before but it’s been very clear to me that the town I knew in the 1960s was quite close to how it was in 1900 and very distant from how it looks and feels today. The way of life, relationships, and human knowledge has changed so much that we regard the communities in which we live very differently to the way people only a generation or two ago did.

Some of the recent physical changes apply to many small to medium sized towns. The identical shopping malls, the out of town stores, the pedestrianised areas, the extensive car parks, and the heavy traffic. Old buildings will have been demolished in the 1960s and ‘70s, following on from pre-war slum clearance and the replacements probably look far more out of date than the original would.

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Hello, my name is Terry Bracher, Archives and Local Studies Manager and along with my colleague Laurel Miller, who is our Heritage Education Officer, one of my favourite jobs is to help co-ordinate one of the History Centre’s big annual events, which is our Open Day. It takes place on Saturday 1st October from 10am – 4pm. Last year we had over a thousand people visit the History Centre at our Open Day participating in a range of family fun activities and this year looks like being as popular.

The Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre

Of course, a lot of planning goes into the event, but did you know that we start almost once the previous Open Day has ended? First we have to review the activities that took place and look at your wonderful and informative feedback to see what was successful and if anything worked less well, so that we can make improvements the following year.

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Wiltshire and Swindon Archives has been successful in securing a grant of £22,700 to help open up the historic archives of the Earls of Radnor, including unique letters by George Washington, Horatio Nelson and Queen Elizabeth I.

Writing to Lord Radnor in 1797, former U.S. President Washington was looking forward to retirement: “I am now placed in the shade of my vine and fig tree; and at the age of sixty five, am recommencing my agricultural & rural pursuits; which were always more congenial to my temper and disposition than the noise & bustle of public employment; notwithstanding so small a portion of my life has been engaged in the former.”

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Hello, I am Terry, Archives and Local Studies Manager. In my last blog I wrote about a document from the English Civil War, a particular interest of mine. Recently, a researcher at the History Centre gave me a reference to an entry in a parish register that relates to another interest of mine, that is British Black History. It was from the Calne Parish Register of burials and dated 10^th December 1586 and notes the burial of “Maria Mandula advena et aethiops (stranger and AEthiops).”  Is this the earliest reference to a Black person in Wiltshire?

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