HAT awarded £7500 to Hampshire Record Office for their project to catalogue Basingstoke archives so they can be made available for research. This project complements the VCH work to publish research on the town.
As many of you know Basingstoke has a rich history first as a medieval small town, its prosperity depending on sheep and the wool trade, then as a market town in the 17th-18th centuries providing a commercial and social centre for the surrounding area, as a centre for new businesses such as Wallis and Stevens and Burberry in the 19th and 20th centuries, through to its development as a London overspill town in the 1960s.
Among its Basingstoke collections, Hampshire Record Office holds the important Basingstoke Borough archive which dates back to the 13th century, other local authority archives, school records, Church of England and nonconformist church archives, records of local businesses and other organisations, and estate and family archives, including those of major Hampshire landowners such as the Dukes of Bolton at Hackwood and the Jervoise family of Herriard.
The collections to be covered were deposited in a number of separate accessions, but because of their bulk and complexity, and increasingly limited HRO resources, could not be catalogued at the time of receipt. They span over 350 years dating from the mid-17th century to 2014 and are contained in some 127 standard boxes, 1 volume box, 1 portfolio and I roll.
The project is due to start 1 April and will take a year