About the Wenhaston Archive Project

The Project started in September 2007 when a small group of local people led by Arthur Musk came together to collect village photographs. Initially Arthur's plan was to build a record of farming in and around Wenhaston but this rapidly escalated to a much bigger plan to bring together all the photos, documents and memories of village life over the years.

Arthur's concern was that village life had changed radically over the life time of our older residents and it was important to capture their memories and knowledge of the village whilst this was still possible. The inital group consisted of Arthur Musk, Norman Buckley, Tim Heaps, Simon Manning and Alex Manning and Chris Lavender. This group set about collecting, scanning and recording all the old photographs they could lay their hands on. No photographs were retained by the group as the Archive is purely electronic. By March 2008 they had over 800 photographs in the online database which was specially created for the project by Blythweb Ltd.

From this resource they produced a slideshow DVD and they staged a two day exhibition (29/30 March 2008) in Wenhaston Village Hall designed to show the village many of the photographs and to gather from them as much information as possible about those images. This exhibition contained over 300 photographs and was created by Chris Lavender using specially made cardboard display stands! It was a huge success both in terms of numbers of visitors and also the material that was gathered.

The Wenhaston Archive Project has no external funding and everything has been done by local poeple using local resources. The costs of the exhbition were covered by donations at the exhbitions, sales of DVDs and sales of A4 copies of images from the Archive.

For the future we hope to collect digital copies of cine films and video film and we plan to make high quality digital recordings of older residents recalling life in the village in days gone by.

If you have any photographs or other documents relating to village life from any period we would love to add them to our archive. If you can let us borrow the originals so that we can scan them that would be very helpful and we promise to process them carefully and return them promptly. Please contact either Tim Heaps (tim@wenhaston.net) or Arthur Musk (01502 478266) to make arrangements. Alternatively if it is not possible to let us borrow the originals we would be happy to have an electronic copy by email (ideally scanned at 600dpi). In both cases we would really appreciate as much information about the photograph as possible including when and where it was taken and the names of any people shown.

Email the Archive Group: archive@wenhaston.net

Telephone:

Arthur Musk : 01502 478266
Tim Heaps : 01502 478712
Chris Lavender: 01502 478633

Postal Address:

Wenhaston Archive Group
c/o Arthur Musk
Drift Bungalow,
Hog Lane,
Wenhaston,
Halesworth
Suffolk IP19 9HA