The Staffordshire Hoard, the largest collection of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver ever discovered, was found in a field by a metal detectorist in 2009.
Acquisition through the Treasure process by Birmingham City Council and Stoke-on-Trent City Council began a 10-year journey to conserve and study this remarkable assemblage.
The National Service Act of December 1941 legalised the conscription of women for war work. At first, only single women aged 20 to 30 were called up.
Women could opt for work in industries such as munitions factories, aircraft and tank factories, or in shipbuilding. Farming was also an option.
They might also choose to join one of the uniformed services, either the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, or the Women’s Royal Navy Service.
North Staffordshire Heritage would be interested to learn about the lives of any African-Caribbean Slaves who lived in Staffordshire during the 17th and 18th centuries. Local historians are invited to contact us if they have found records of African-Caribbean or other slaves living and working in their area.
“When the Napoleonic Wars came to an end, the landowners did not want a return to a world where competitive foreign imports drove down prices, forcing them to sell their grain for less than they were prepared to sell it, and so a plan was hatched to protect them and their grain prices.”
“The Laws were there to protect the landed gentry in the countryside at the expense of the income and quality of life of the working classes. It didn’t even help the farmers in the countryside because landowners charged them higher rents.”
In the 1950s and 60s, self-service stores replaced local shops in town centres throughout North Staffordshire and South Cheshire.
If your family used self-service stores, please share your memories of shopping there with our readers, telling them how self-service stores differed from High Street and corner shops.
This selection of photographs from the Historic England Archive shows shops, shopkeepers and shoppers in each decade from the 1880s to the 1980s.
They illustrate a century of changing shopping habits and shop architecture.
Women from North Staffordshire were “called up” for military service or war work during the Second World War. Some served in the armed forces. Others built Spitfires at Castle Bromwich or worked in munitions factories at Swynnerton and Radway Green
To celebrate National Volunteers Week, we went back to 1940 and joined these two Derby Women’s Voluntary Service members during WWII. Here they are with their mobile canteen, one of hundreds that the WVS manned across the country during the war. Canteens were often donated to a community to keep up morale…
North Staffordshire Heritage 