What’s next

Who lived and worked here?

We want to digitise the available trade and town directories, working back as far as the surviving records allow. These record the shops, trades, businesses and people who occupied Leominster’s streets at different dates.

The information will continue to build the timeline on each building’s page, allowing visitors to follow changes in occupation and use. Census records will help fill gaps and add household context, connecting business names with the people who lived above, behind or alongside them.

Historical addresses, street names and numbering can change. Records will be cross-referenced carefully, with uncertain matches identified rather than presented as established fact. Each entry will retain its source so that visitors can understand where the information came from.

Opening up the archives

One of our largest ambitions is to make more of Leominster’s archival material accessible through the website. This includes the Corporation records reaching back into the sixteenth century, including material thought to date from around 1530. The dates of the surviving records still need to be confirmed.

Deeds, leases, minute books and accounts can reveal how the town was governed, how property changed hands, what people paid, what they argued about and how everyday life was organised. Newspapers add another dimension, with social occasions, advertisements, disputes, accidents and individual stories.

The aim is not simply to upload scanned pages. We want to make records searchable and connect them to the relevant buildings, people, streets and events. Visitors should be able to follow their own route through the history, from a house to an occupier, from that person to a business, and from the business to a story in the local newspaper.

This is a substantial project that would develop in phases. Digitisation and publication will depend on access, permissions, the condition of the material and the time needed to check transcriptions. Automated transcription may help, but uncertain readings will remain visible and need to be checked against the originals.

More photographs, more connections

We will continue adding the photographic records available to the project, including historic street views, individual buildings, shops, workplaces and events.

Where possible, photographs will be attached to their locations on the map and linked to related building records. Dates, viewpoints, photographers and sources will be recorded where known, with uncertainty acknowledged.

Local knowledge can be particularly useful here. Someone may recognise a shopkeeper, identify a business, narrow down a date or explain what stood just outside the frame. Contributions will retain appropriate credits, with publication permissions checked.

Building by building, story by story

As the Journal develops, it will explore individual buildings, people and episodes in the town’s history. These articles will provide room to explain discoveries, compare sources and show how an interpretation has developed.

Some articles may investigate a familiar landmark. Others may begin with a small detail, a blocked doorway, an unusual name in an account book, a lost business or a photograph that raises more questions than it answers.

The emphasis will be on readable, interesting stories supported by evidence, with links back to the relevant places and records.

Leominster in three dimensions

An ambitious longer-term aim is to develop a photogrammetric model of the town, a three-dimensional model created from overlapping photographs, that can be explored alongside the website’s mapping. The work already undertaken at the Grange provides a starting point for testing what is possible.

We will investigate how separate surveys might be brought together, what level of detail can be retained and how a larger model would perform on ordinary phones and computers. The eventual coverage and resolution will depend on those tests.

This could be enhanced by 360-degree photographs, which let visitors look around from a fixed point, and Gaussian splats, a technique that uses photographs to create three-dimensional views that visitors can move around. These approaches can help people explore a place, but a digital view is not necessarily a measured survey. Any claim about measurement accuracy would need to be supported by the way it was recorded and checked.

The ambition is to help people understand buildings and spaces in context, including places that cannot easily be visited. Any expansion will need appropriate access and permissions, with care around privacy and sensitive locations.

Beneath the streets

We will continue the work recording Leominster’s basements and other underground spaces through Under Ground Leominster. As the evidence develops, this material can form a map overlay showing how these spaces relate to the streets and buildings above.

The project could bring together measured surveys, photographs, construction details and documentary references. It may help identify earlier building phases, former uses and relationships that are no longer apparent at street level.

Surveyed spaces will be distinguished from reported or unverified features. Separate cellars will not be presented as a connected tunnel system without evidence. Public information will respect owners’ consent and avoid exposing sensitive access details.

Putting dates to the timber frames

Leominster contains a substantial concentration of timber-framed buildings, including many concealed behind later brickwork, render and shopfronts. Yet the town’s detailed dating remains incomplete.

We want to seek funding for a programme of dendrochronology, or tree-ring dating, focused on suitable buildings and specific research questions. Successful sampling could establish felling dates or date ranges for timbers, helping us understand construction phases, alterations and the development of the town.

Not every timber can be dated, and a result relates to the sampled timber. Its position, possible reuse and relationship to the surrounding structure still need interpretation.

How early are Leominster’s surviving timber frames, and what might still be hidden behind the façades?

The ambition is to replace assumptions with evidence and discover where Leominster belongs in the wider story of England’s surviving timber-framed towns.

Reconstructing medieval Leominster

A longer-term idea is an evolving map of fifteenth-century Leominster, bringing together evidence for buildings, streets, routes, plots and activities during a period of the town’s medieval prosperity.

The reconstruction would draw on surviving fabric, archaeology, documentary research and later maps interpreted with care. It would distinguish features supported by evidence from approximate locations and more tentative reconstructions.

This would be a developing interpretation, revised as new information emerges, rather than a definitive picture of the town in one particular year.

Could part of your house already have been standing? Could your street follow a medieval route? This is a chance to explore the town beneath the town we know today.

An A–Z of architectural curiosities

We plan to build on the success of the Leominster Heritage Instagram videos with an A–Z glossary of architectural terms.

The glossary will give visitors straightforward explanations of the details they see around them, using photographs, local examples and links to relevant buildings. It should be approachable enough for someone encountering a term for the first time, while remaining useful to anyone who wants to look more closely.

A planned animated roulette feature will let visitors spin a wheel, land on a letter and discover a term. As the video alphabet develops, entries can also include their corresponding Instagram films.

This is learning through curiosity and humour, with accurate definitions behind the jokes. The eventual feature will also offer a normal alphabetical list, keyboard access and a reduced-motion option, so the animation is optional.

Add your archaeology

We would like to develop a way for people to contribute information about objects or features encountered in their gardens or during other work.

It might be a nail, a piece of pottery, a fragment of glass or something not yet identified. It may be recent or much older. Even an ordinary object can become useful when its location and context are recorded.

The eventual contribution process would help people provide photographs, dimensions, the circumstances of discovery and whatever they know about the location. Submissions would be reviewed before publication, with uncertain identifications clearly labelled and sensitive locations protected.

This is an invitation to record things already encountered, not to dig for finds or disturb possible archaeological remains. Appearance alone cannot establish that an object is Saxon or otherwise significant. The project would help direct contributors towards appropriate specialist advice and reporting routes when needed.

History talks without the homework

We want to develop a programme of approachable, light-hearted talks about the history, buildings and discoveries that interest us.

This could include a recurring “Leominster History 101” introduction, so that people can gain the background needed to enjoy more specialist events. Whether it could run regularly or annually remains to be decided. You should not need a PhD, or years of prior reading, to feel welcome.

Alongside these introductory sessions, we hope to invite interesting speakers and share new research from the project. Talks should make room for questions, local memories and discussion, with clear explanations of unfamiliar terms.

Visit Talks and events for any announced events.

Training people to use and care for archives

We want to seek grant funding to help people gain confidence in using archives and contributing to the project.

Training could cover finding relevant records, reading older handwriting, checking transcriptions, recording sources, digitising photographs and documents, and organising information so that others can use it.

A related ambition is to support the cataloguing, digitisation and appropriate care of material already available to the project. This would help turn individual contributions into a useful, lasting resource while building local skills.

The aim is supported participation, with guidance and manageable tasks. Funding and a training programme have not yet been secured.