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Hoole Community Trust – Hoole’s Victorian Heritage
A Heritage Lottery Fund ‘All Our Stories’ case study
Project Summary
Hoole’s Victorian Heritage documented and explored the Victorian history of Hoole; focussing on
Hoole’s period of growth following the arrival of the railway at Chester Station. It did this via a range of
intergenerational activities, including visits, reminiscences and researching the history of the local
football club.
The grantee for this project, Hoole History and Heritage Society, was recently set up, partly in
response to this project. It is based in a community centre, and has around 12 core members, from a
range of backgrounds and with different skills (including some historians); around eight people were
strongly involved in this project. Full membership is around 60, and many individuals are members of
other local community groups, giving them strong links to the school and a couple of church groups.
The project visited a range of museums and archives. They began with a trip to a local history and
heritage centre, to find out more about the local resources available in Chester. In addition,
participants visited the Cheshire Record Office, and had training on how to use the archive. This was
the source of ‘a huge amount of primary evidence’ and allowed the project to take away a very
accurate narrative of the Victorian period in Hoole. They also visited the Grosvenor and Gladstone
archives in Kew Gardens, where they researched the Hoole photographer James Hanson Spencer.
They also visited the Railway Museum in York, taking along a local volunteer who used to work on the
North Wales railways. Following this initial research the project ran a series of monthly sessions,
using information they’d gathered from the research phase. They had around 60 people attend each
session:
■ In May, they focussed on streets, roads and lands, using census returns;
■ In June they explored the church school, leisure, law and politics;
■ In July, they looked at clubs, societies, and how sport developed; including the role of allotments
as a basis for social life;
■ In September, they explored the site of the Royal Agricultural Show. This led to a range of
discoveries, including photos of the ‘sumptuous interior of the Royal Pavilion’, taken by a Chester
photographer, James Hanson Spencer. The project is currently producing a final report on the
archaeology of the site, and history of the photographer;
■ The last session, in October, they held an event at the Bromfield Arms discussing the early history
of Chester Football Club (which was founded there). The session was run by a local writer, and
the audience included former Chester players.
Alongside this work, the project also worked with two groups of children from a local primary school, a
group of five year olds, and a group of eight year olds. With the five year olds, the project ran a
session on Victorian toys; using photos of toys, examples from the Grosvenor museum, and asking
pupils to go home and ask their parents for old toys. With the eight year olds the project explored
Victorian shops and advertising, with the children producing artwork which went up in local shops.
The project culminated in a Victorian event on Hoole’s main shopping street, to time with the switching
on of the Christmas lights. They had initially intended this to be a Victorian Pageant, but realised it
would be too dark for this to work well. They therefore worked with the local Community Foundation,
to produce some Victorian music with the local school children. Here, they built on their work in the
primary schools, and used Community Foundation funding to hire a music composer to work with the
children, their parents and grandparents to compose an original piece of music, inspired by Victorian
Hoole. The event was held on 16th November, with at least 1,000 people attending; the event
included the children performing the original song, plus three additional songs from different decades.
Hoole History and Heritage Society have a number of plans to further develop this work. They are
currently putting together a digital archive of some of their findings. This will be uploaded to their
website, which they hope to make more interactive through the use of Facebook. They also intend to
hold some interviews, and plan to create several tours of Victorian Hoole. They also intend to do
some work related to WWI in the coming year.