A Home of Letters and Learning: Launching a Community Archive at Overton Community Centre. Overton Community Association (OCA) applied for funding towards this project. HAT is delighted to grant £870 for the purchase of AV equipment and scanner for strand 2 of their project Capturing and preserving memories
A “Memory Booth” will be set up at OCC during Heritage Open Days, inviting former pupils of the National School and long-standing community members to share recorded memories. Volunteers will guide the recorded sessions, working from a simple briefing and a set of prompt questions to keep the conversations consistent and easy to run. The recording equipment purchased through this grant will be a permanent, reusable asset for all future archive and community events.
All collected materials will be catalogued and digitised in-kind, with a new section of the OCC website providing free public access.
We would also like to capture the voices and stories of Overton Mill before they are lost. Many generations of Overtonians relied on the mill for employment, making it an important part of the village’s identity; recording these memories supports and complements the work Heritage Overton is doing to preserve them in written form.
Overton Community Association is the charitable body that owns and manages Overton Community Centre (OCC), a Grade II listed building at the heart of Overton, Hampshire. OCA is governed by a board of unpaid volunteer trustees, several of whom have archival, educational, and community engagement experience.
OCC is one of the principal community hubs for the villages of Overton, Laverstoke, and the surrounding parishes. The building that stands today was built as a school, prior to that a coaching inn was on the site. Jane Austen and her family used the postal service at that coaching inn to send and receive letters.
Today, the building provides meeting and event space for community groups, hall hire for local events, and is the home base for a range of organisations including a preschool and local history, arts, and wellness groups. It also houses Overton Library.
