We’re working on a new history of Brimington and Tapton

As this blog explains, some members of our local history group are assisting in a new account of Brimington’s and Tapton’s history.

It may not look much, but this is the front cover of Victoria County History’s draft text on Tapton, which heralds a new chapter in local history research. The final result will be a much more polished version, to which members of our local history group will have contributed.

Our group (and individually some of our members) are subscribers to the Derbyshire Victoria County History Trust (VCH), which is the county supporting charity for this England-wide project, seeking to research and write a new history of every community in the country.

Under a county editor – Philip Riden – for some years a volunteer research group based in Chesterfield has been examining sources for Brimington’s and Tapton’s history, alongside other communities in and surrounding Chesterfield. Now the research is sufficiently advanced to revise previously compiled draft text on our two communities and some of our group members are involved with revising this text.

Whilst that might not sound too exciting, we believe that the end result will see a much better and authoritative account of our communities published than hereto. This is particularly true as volunteer efforts are backed-up by academic research. For example, the manorial history, will be more effectively traced than it has been before and Brimington Hall’s history will be properly addressed. The route of the Roman road – Ryknield Street, former open fields and the history of Tapton House will also be addressed. We’ve been able to use some of the research on our short history webpages, but our sources haven’t been referenced there (but are available by contacting us). VCH fully references all sources, so that those interested can refer to them if needs be.

We’ll be pulling out some of the findings in this new VCH history of our community over the coming months. We’ll also hopefully be able to have at least one of our talks about these new findings following this research, when our meeting programme starts again, hopefully in September.

Naturally we very much welcome VCH’s attention to Brimington and Tapton and will be helping wherever we can and keeping you up-to-date through this blog.

In the meantime you can find out more about how VCH presents its text and look at some already published draft text for some other parishes by following the links here.

In the meantime, as a taster here’s three pages from the latest Tapton text, which cover some of the township’s economic history.