Blogging a Building (6)

This week we’ve been doing a bit of time travelling, journeying between the present and the 1970s when our building reached the end of its days as Kingsholm School. It’s been a low budget trip as we haven’t needed a TARDIS or the Time Lords’ other advanced technology.  Instead, our trusty time portal has been some perfectly preserved photos that are in our collections, which means you can enjoy the tour too!

Cloakroom area then research room; the entrance to the new Heritage Hub will be on the right.

Gym then strongroom for outsize items; the wall to the left will be removed to create a flexible volunteer workspace that links to the new research room.

This area is soon to become the new Archives research room; most of the internal walls will be removed to create it.  The right hand wall behind the red fire extinguisher is the other side of the wall on the left in the images immediately above.

More school day clues: playground tarmac under the concrete footing, an inkwell and marbles.

And finally the most up to the minute news: the tell-tale photo below shows the Horsa (hut) featured in last week’s post has finally bolted and we’re ‘ready for the off’ with works to lay the foundations of our new strongrooms!

Come back next week for another update.

Jill Shonk

Access & Learning Leader

Gloucester’s High Cross, by Liz Jack

Gloucester’s High Cross, as shown in the 1455 Gloucester rental

Every year, on New Year’s Eve, Gloucester residents gather at ‘The Cross’ to celebrate the coming of the New Year.  The vast majority of them believe that The Cross is so-named because it is where the four ‘Gate’ streets meet in the middle of the city.  Not so!  It is named after the original stone memorial cross that stood at the junction for hundreds of years.

Uncovering the past: what’s it all mean?

For the last of our archaeological blogs, we’re looking at what the results of the excavations might mean in terms of what was happening here in the past.

In broad terms, the results from the trenches that were dug can be summarised as follows

Uncovering the past: the finds

Last time we looked at the archaeological digs that took place at Alvin Street, and this post is going to look more closely at the items they unearthed.

In total around 160 finds were recovered from the three trenches, including lots of pottery, fragments of clay pipes, worked bone, metal artefacts, building materials and over 7kgs of animal bones!

There is an old saying in the county ‘Scratch Gloucestershire – find Rome’ and the excavations certainly reinforced this point.

Uncovering the past

If you’ve been following our recent blog posts you’ll know that we’ve been exploring the history of our site, just off Alvin Street in Gloucester, as part of the “For the Record” project.

We’ve looked at documents about this building’s history as Kingsholm School, at maps showing the plant nursery that was on this site in the 1850s, and at a map of Gloucester’s civil war defences showing this area.  What we didn’t know much about was the site’s earlier history, which is where the archaeologists came in! 

Meeting the Neighbours

On Monday 18 May we were delighted to welcome some of our neighbours to the Archives to learn more about our plans for the “For the Record” project.

What’s beneath our feet?

As part of the development activities for our For the Record project, we’ve been looking into the history of our Alvin Street site. And we’ve unearthed some fascinating facts.

‘The Howse that was so fayre’

This is the story of ‘The Howse that was so fayre’, investigated by Chipping Campden History Society over the past eighteen months. In 2013 Gloucestershire Local History Association’s annual Local History Afternoon carried the theme of ‘Gloucestershire’s Special Houses’. There was an obvious one for us, Campden House.