Category: Stories from the Archives

Tobacco Farm

A Hampshire Tobacco Farm

If a pioneer from Church Crookham had succeeded, Hampshire fields might have fewer solar panels and more tobacco plants. For obvious reasons, smoking is today a minority activity, but a...

History with Film and Sound

Hazeley Down

Wartime ‘Sandhurst’ on the downs Now completely gone, a huge hutted camp once hastened ordinary men towards Army commissions during WWI on an expanse of chalk downland near Winchester. In...

twyford pump

Industrial archaeology – a study of the well-engineered

The things that make life bearable risk being the ‘Cinderella’ of conservation and record keeping, but are well worth keeping. You can read an awful lot of history books –...

The Small Shires of Hampshire

Hampshire Before Domesday – new ideas from old place-names

Clever detective work is putting flesh on the way Hampshire was governed before the arrival of the Normans. During the last hundred years many small countries have experienced the withdrawal...

William Cobbett

William Cobbett and The Dilemmas of Writing History

Recent decisions to cancel a celebration in Hampshire of the bicentenary of Rural Rides by William Cobbett on grounds of historic antisemitism and racism have raised questions about the practice...

Sherfield Hatchett Inn

The Great Sherfield Hatchett Dispute

Sherfield English straddles what had been the mid 19th century turnpike road, and consists of scattered dwellings with two clusters on the main road, one at the Mill Lane junction,...

stoney cross

Stoney Cross Post Office Mystery

Stoney Cross today consists of a handful of dwellings, a filling station, a Travel Lodge hotel, and a Little Chef restaurant; all alongside the modern A31 road between Ringwood and...

Letter Carrier and Little Girl 1950s

Austerity in the 1850’s – Christmas Gratuities for Letter Carriers

Christmas is a time of good cheer, but in 1852 a cold blast of austerity struck the country, nowhere was spared, not even Romsey. Local traders had commonly distributed gifts...

hat articles (3)

Worthy Houses

It’s only when you examine an area’s historic houses carefully that you realise that those charged with deciding which should be given statutory protection don’t have a very easy job....