Welcome to the Industrial Heritage Networks and Support website. This site is maintained and updated by the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust who run the project and the networks. We aim to support industrial heritage in England through networking, information exchange, guidance, and training. Please explore the website and please contribute! For more information you can … Read more Welcome to the IHNs website!
Heritage Open Days has released their events directory for the 2023 festival that will take place from 8-17 September. The events directory will enable interested individuals to search for events nearby during the festival, with more to be added in the run-up to it. In 2022 there were over 100 industrial heritage and archaeology sites open to the public.
2023 industrial heritage sites open to the public include the Armley Mills in Leeds, Finch Foundry in Devon, Forge Mill Needle Museum in Redditch, the 1900 cable station at Cuckmere Haven in Sussex, Quarry Bank Mill in Cheshire, Somerset brick & Tile Museum, Torr Vale Mill in Derbyshire, Thwaite Watermill in Leeds, Wheatley Windmill in Oxfordshire and many more.
For the first time since 2019 the Industrial Heritage Support project (IHSO) will be holding in-person industrial heritage network meetings this summer and autumn. The first of these will be the IHN West Midlands which is scheduled to take place at Blists Hill, Ironbridge, on Wednesday 31st May, 11am to 3pm. The second will be the IHN South East which is scheduled to take part at Amberley Museum, West Sussex on 1st June, 11am to 3pm.
The meetings are open to Industrial Heritage Networks members and to all those interested in supporting and helping the industrial heritage and industrial archaeology sector in England. Each network meeting will be split into two parts. There will be a business meeting from 11am to 1pm looking at volunteer engagement since COVID, followed by a tour of the Blists Hill and Amberley sites, respectively. Each network meeting is free and tea, coffee, and water will be provided. Please bring your own lunch. To book please follow the links below:
This year’s East of England Industrial Archaeology Conference will be on the 10th June 2023. EERIAC is held once a year and rotates round the region. 2023 is the turn for Essex, and will be held at Chelmsford Museum. EIAG (Essex Industrial Archaeology Group) is bringing to you EERIAC 2023, focussing on the Industrial Heritage of Chelmsford.
Talks include Chelmsford’s industries, Marconi, and visits to industrial sites in the Moulsham area, on the Chelmsford’s Industrial Trail. Please bring your own lunch. If you are interested in booking a place contact Jane Giffould via email: jgiffould@aol.com
The latest in the Association for Industrial Archaeology’s joint international seminar series takes place online on 27th May. The East-West series of workshops aims to exchange ideas and knowledge among Western and Eastern colleagues to build a more international and diverse industrial archaeology. The activity is organised jointly by the Institute for Cultural Heritage and History of Science & Technology (USTB, China), and the UK Association for Industrial Archaeology together with its Young Members Board.
From underground to outer space, from the 14th to the 21st century, the 4th E-W Workshop on Industrial Archaeology explores the interlinkages of archaeology, technology, science and industry with cases from Australia, Asia, Europe and the Universe! This edition of the workshop revisits the original focus of industrial archaeology on the research and conservation of technology, which is expanded and revised with new geographies, chronologies, methodologies and questions.
The speakers will be:
Alice GORMAN (Flinders University, Australia): Beyond the rocket: the archaeological study of space technology.
Shujing FENG (National Academy of Innovation Strategy & Tsinghua University, China): Wenzhou Alum Mine from the perspective of the archaeology of technology.
Geoffrey WALLIS (GW Conservation/Dorothea Restorations & AIA, UK): Developments in practical engineering conservation. The works of Dorothea Restorations Ltd.
Join the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust as they celebrate Blists Hill Victorian Town’s 50th Birthday with a day of entertainment, activities and lots of fun! The theme for the day is a traditional Mop (or Hiring) Fair.
Beginning back in the 14th century, Mop Fairs were an annual opportunity to match workers to employers, especially in rural areas.Farm workers, labourers, servants and craftsmen would congregate in their Sunday best displaying a symbol of their trade, so a farmer might display a piece of straw, housemaids held brooms or mops, hence the name mop fair. In Shropshire, young women employed to collect ironstone from the waste tips of local clay mines, known as Shroppies, often travelled to London to work from May until September during the fruit and vegetable season in order to earn extra money.
On Saturday 1 April, try your hand at different trades and decide which occupation you may have been employed in if you had lived in 1900 such as:
Tile making
Laundry
China Flower Making
Printing
Brick Making
Blacksmithing
Candle Dipping
Throughout the day you will also be able to join in in the parade to mark the departure of the Shroppies and enjoy the music of the Wellington Brass Band. The Town will be dressed for celebration with flags and bunting and the air will be filled with fun and laughter. Visitors will be able to see casting in the Iron Foundry and will have plenty of opportunity to hear about the town’s humble beginnings back in 1973. Activities are included in the admission fee. See: https://www.ironbridge.org.uk/events/
Strutts North Mill, Belper, Derbyshire, which will be open for tours during Heritage Open Days 2022.
It has been confirmed that the 2022 version of Heritage Open Days will run as planned, from the 9th to the 18th of September, despite the Queen’s death on the 8th September. Hundreds of industrial heritage and archaeology sites run by local groups and communities feature on the list of venues open for free to the public.
The theme of ‘Astounding Inventions’ has helped to more than double the number of industrial heritage sites accessible this year, up from 113 in 2021 to 239 in 2022. There were no in-person events in 2020 due to the COVID pandemic. The largest group of industrial sites opening relate to transport, with 70 historic aircraft, canal, railway, and road sites available to explore. This includes small scale sites such as the Union Bridge and Warmley Signal Box, as well as many Heritage Railways and transport museums such as Locomotion, in Durham and the Greater Manchester Transport Museum.
The largest category of industrial sites to open their doors remains wind and watermills, as it was in 2021, with 51 sites. Larger industrial museums with entry charges are also offering free events, from the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust to the National Trust properties such as Quarry Bank Textile Mill. There are also private working or small heritage sites accessible, that are seldom open to the public, such as G H Hurt & Son’s Shawl Factory in Nottingham, The Harveys Brewery in Lewes, Sussex, and the RDF radar tower at Harwich in Essex.
For details of where to find venues and their opening times during Britain’s biggest annual heritage festival follow this link: https://www.heritageopendays.org.uk/
In July 2020, the Association for Industrial Archaeology (AIA) established a Young Members Board (YMB) as a sub-committee of the Association, composed of early or mid-career people with an interest in industrial archaeology and heritage. The AIA recognize that the current demographic of both the membership and Council needs refreshing, and believe that by engaging with younger and more diverse people the Association can together better deliver the aim of the AIA to ‘give our past a future’.
The YMB provides an exciting new opportunity for you to work with like-minded people to influence the direction of the Association and industrial archaeology generally, raise your own profile, develop your personal skills and knowledge, build your CV, network with interesting and knowledgeable people, and take on real responsibility. They are now seeking the next round of new members to join the Board and fill vacancies in the YMB. This is a great way to take the Association and Industrial Archaeology forward.
To apply, please submit your CV and a short description of why you would like to join to:
The Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust has been awarded £9.9 million by the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) from the Cultural Assets Fund (CAF), a £20 million government funding stream to protect treasured heritage assets in England from the impact of the coronavirus pandemic. This funding will allow the museum to carry out a backlog of urgent conservation and repair work to 49 historic buildings and structures across the UNESCO World Heritage Site. This includes five scheduled monuments and 30 listed buildings which are recognised individually and collectively for their architectural and historic significance.
The Cultural Assets Fund is funding specifically for conservation work identified as part of the IGMT Quinquennial Review, carried out in 2021. £5.5m of the fund has been allocated specifically for the repair and maintenance of the historical buildings and monuments. The grant also includes £4.5m endowment funding which will be invested to ensure income generation for continuing conservation maintenance and to help safeguard the future of the heritage assets.
Visitor figures to Ironbridge, which has recently experienced devastating floods, dropped by almost 75% in 2020 due to the pandemic, compared to 2019. With less visitor income, the organisation’s funds for vital conservation repair work have been significantly reduced. The pandemic also meant that volunteers were unable to offer their usual help with site maintenance, including flooding repair work. In contrast, 2019 saw over 400 individuals volunteering almost 25,000 hours of their time to support the site.
The funding will support vital repairs to some of Ironbridge’s most important structures, which reveal how its rural landscape was transformed and optimised in the 18th century to provide the transport links, raw materials, and natural resources required for industrial processes such as iron, brick making, and ceramics. The survival of this heritage in its original context is crucial for maintaining the integrity and authenticity of Ironbridge as a designated World Heritage Site, attracting visitors from across the world.
Men working at a Stoke-on-Trent bottle kiln, 1965-68. Copyright Historic England.
Historic England’s new ‘Everyday Heritage Grants: Celebrating Working Class Histories’ will fund community-led and people-focused projects that aim to further the nation’s collective understanding of the past. These pilot grants will focus on heritage that links people to overlooked historic places, with a particular interest in recognising and celebrating working class histories.
From palaces to terraced houses, stately homes to barns, our towns and landscapes are filled with symbols of our past. But not everyone’s stories are told and not everyone’s history is remembered. The Everyday Heritage Grants Scheme aims to engage with the widest possible range of heritage and helps to further the nation’s collective understanding of England’s past. Historic England are inviting applications from community or heritage organisations/museums to apply for grants up to £25,000 to fund projects that will celebrate the built or historic environment near them.
Each project should enable people to creatively share overlooked or untold stories of the places where they live andencourage communities, groups and local people to examine and tell their own stories in their own ways.
Historic England is also looking for projects that provide innovative volunteering opportunities for young people or people facing loneliness or isolation, as well as contribute positively to participants’ wellbeing.
As a result of these funded projects, heritage and stories that have been previously overlooked will be recognised and revealed, with buildings or historic sites acting as the inspiration. People will be able to tell their own stories, in their own way, and be encouraged to connect with others in their local communities.
The application window for the Emergency Resource Support Fund, through the Culture Recovery Fund, has been extended. This is designed to support arts and heritage organisations through the impact of the Omicron variant this winter. A further £30 million has been made available by the UK Government. This fund aims to provide emergency funding awards to organisations that were financially sustainable before Covid-19 but are now at imminent risk of failure and have exhausted all other options for increasing their resilience. Deadline extended to 18th January 2022 to submit a permission to apply
National Heritage Lottery
A variety of grant funding streams are now open through the National Heritage Lottery. These include the National Lottery Project Grants, which is an open access programme for arts, libraries, and museum projects. NLPG is a rolling programme, so applications can be made at any time. Decisions on applications for £30,000 or less take 8 weeks, decisions for over £30,000 take 12 weeks.
The Unlocking Collections grant stream is a time-limited priority fund within the National Lottery Project Grants portfolio aimed at enabling museums to develop their collections-based work and increase public engagement with, and use of, their collections. Applications accepted until November 2022.
The Let’s Create Jubilee Fund is designed to support voluntary and community organisations who want to deliver creative activity as part of Her Majesty the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations. Deadline 28th February 2022.
Association for Industrial Archaeology
The AIA’s annual round of grants and awards is open. There are a variety of grants available (including community, research, and travel bursaries), as well as awards ranging from conservation and adaptive re-use, to publications: see here: https://industrial-archaeology.org/aia-awards/ The deadline for most is 31st January2022. However, the Restoration Grants deadline is 31st March 2022.
Industrial Heritage Networks 