
Last week we were joined by thirteen volunteers, some old friends and some new faces from across the city, to kick off our local history research project. We’re really interested in learning more about the history of The Old Library & our local area by building up a picture of how it’s changed over the years using historic research and people’s memories of living in Tuebrook. What we discover will generate community heritage activities, help us plan our archaeological dig, inform the historic displays inside the finished building and hopefully produce a local history book by the end of the project.
We ran two training days for our volunteers with Vanessa and colleagues from the Museum of Liverpool. On the first day we got together at Amber House on Green Lane, where we had a great view of The Old Library next door through the meeting room window, to start talking about the different topics people were interested in researching. Having such a big group is great as it means we can look into lots of different aspects of our local heritage over the next few months.
We ran two training days for our volunteers with Vanessa and colleagues from the Museum of Liverpool. On the first day we got together at Amber House on Green Lane, where we had a great view of The Old Library next door through the meeting room window, to start talking about the different topics people were interested in researching. Having such a big group is great as it means we can look into lots of different aspects of our local heritage over the next few months.

We also started looking at historic maps from the 1890s right up to present day to see how the landscape has changed over time. There’s definitely some interesting work to be done here and we’re keen to find out about things like street names, buildings that have appeared or disappeared and the people living in neighbouring roads who might have used the library over the years.
Our second training day kicked off at Central Library where we were given a fantastic tour by Roger who showed us all the different resources we can use such as maps, newspapers, census data and online databases – we were really impressed to have such an amazing facility in our city! We also saw behind the scenes of the archives rooms and Roger had kindly found some historic documents and photos relating to the library which we’ll be back to take a closer look at.
Our second training day kicked off at Central Library where we were given a fantastic tour by Roger who showed us all the different resources we can use such as maps, newspapers, census data and online databases – we were really impressed to have such an amazing facility in our city! We also saw behind the scenes of the archives rooms and Roger had kindly found some historic documents and photos relating to the library which we’ll be back to take a closer look at.

We then walked down to the Museum of Liverpool where Vanessa showed us some of the finds from the Pembroke Place archaeological dig before Liz Stewart, Curator of Archaeology & the Built Environment, gave us a tour of the Museum to explain how a combination of archaeological exploration has developed what’s on display in the museum.
Finally, we looked round the Galkoff’s exhibition which is the culmination of a two year project involving almost 70 research volunteers. Although our display in The Old Library probably won’t be quite the same scale, it was really inspiring to hear about all the fascinating stories the volunteers had uncovered through their work and got us really excited for our own project.
Over the next few months, our volunteer team will start looking into their chosen topics and we’ll be meeting up again in February to see what we’ve learnt so far so watch this space for updates – who knows what we might find!
Finally, we looked round the Galkoff’s exhibition which is the culmination of a two year project involving almost 70 research volunteers. Although our display in The Old Library probably won’t be quite the same scale, it was really inspiring to hear about all the fascinating stories the volunteers had uncovered through their work and got us really excited for our own project.
Over the next few months, our volunteer team will start looking into their chosen topics and we’ll be meeting up again in February to see what we’ve learnt so far so watch this space for updates – who knows what we might find!