As you know Geoff Butter, who grew up and lived in Adderley for much of his life has offered the village the most amazing collection of archive materials about the village and its history. He has been collecting this over the last 50 years. It truly is a vast collection and everyone who has seen it has been rather overwhelmed by the size, richness and the the diversity of the materials. Its our history and it would be awful if it was lost to us.
A group of people from the community decided that it would be worth putting in a Heritage Lottery Bid to preserve this collection for future generations. This has required an immense amount of work over the last year. We have submitted the bid which includes a Heritage Trail around the points of interest in the community, (not intruding on private property), digitisation of all the photographs and articles and other documents about our village going back hundreds of years in some cases, a website which will host copies of all documents to be easily accessible to all and a variety of other proposals which will include as many people as possible in celebrating our history.
We have pulled together support from all sorts of people and places and if successful in our bid we will be working with them all. They include Shropshire Archive who will catalogue all the materials and host the most precious and vulnerable artefacts; our school who are very excited to be involved in all sorts of ways, Keele University who hope to support the project with a graduate being involved; The Oral History Society and Storytellers.
Sounds amazing doesn’t it? However, the bidding process for Heritage Lottery Funding is very very competitive and we have no idea whether our bid will be successful. The bid is in, the lottery have confirmed receipt and asked us a number of questions for clarification and we now wait for them to consider and tell us. Yesterday they emailed us to say that this will take up to a month so we have our fingers crossed and hope that it will be a positive response.
If anyone is interested in finding out more please get in touch with webmaster@adderleyparish.co.uk and the information will be passed on.
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