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Welcome to Heald Green's Heritage Museum

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By Colin Barnsley

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First Published 14/5/2021
Last Updated 10/1/2022

Welcome to our museum, where we aim to collect, store and share our memories of Heald Green.  In just over 100 years, Heald Green has expanded from a small rural hamlet of around 50 people, to today's suburb of over 12,000.  There's a lot to cover! 

Below, a little information on  how to make your way around this website. I hope you enjoy exploring our history.  There is more content we already have but have not yet had time to prepare it all for display. Keep checking back as we continue to expand our content.
 

Navigating The Museum
 
The menu bar appears on all screens. When you move your cursor over a menu item, it changes colour.  If there are sub-pages, these will display. Hover over and click on the item you want, to go to that page.

The menu options may change, but include 3 main components:-
- articles on the history of places of interest in Heald Green; near Heald Green; and those that have now gone
- a library of reference resources ; books, articles, photos etc, which you can view and search
- links to external websites with history resources we believe may be useful to you.  Links to other pages are typically underlined. When you hover over them, your cursor should change. Click to follow the link. For example this goes to our Heald Green Heritage Facebook Page.

 

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Fig. 1 The Menu Bar

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Fig. 2 The Museum Library - Google Drive

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Browsing The Whole Library 

You can also access the whole library from the museum menu. Click on Library to display it (screen shown above). You can browse the library by clicking on the folders and exploring their content.  There are sections on different document types, and a series of folders containing photos old and new, from various places of interest around Heald Green. Click on the items to display them. N.B. Displayed items don't normally open in a new window. To go back to where you were, don't click on the "x" in the window at the top right - that will close the library!  Instead, click on the left arrow in the black area near the top left of the screen (not the very top left browser cursor.  I know! It's not very intuitive, sorry. But the software is free).
 

All items have extra information about them written "on the back".  This, and any words they contain, can be used to search and find them more easily.  To see this, click on the three dots displayed top right and then select Details. On some devices, you may need to click the 3 dots, select Open In New Window, and then click the three dots again to choose Details.
An additional panel opens and shows you more information about the item.

Library content is being added to all the time, so check back to see if there is more available.

Reproducing Library Items - Copyright Law

With the kind permission of the copyright holders, some items in the library are free to reproduce; most books, magazines and articles for example. In general, almost all of the colour photos you can copy, some of the black and white ones you can't. Copyright information is given in the details against each item. Photos have been watermarked not to declare that the heritage museum holds the copyright, but rather as a means of tracing the origins of a photo if it is reproduced.
 
Please be respectful of copyright. As a research site, copyright law "fair use" generally permits us to display some photos from a work, with appropriate acknowledgements of where they were sourced and details of the copyright holder. 
 
We would actively encourage the use of the materials on the website for research and in your work for school / college etc - it's one of the reasons why we've created the website.  If you intend to reproduce copyrighted items more widely than that, and especially if you intend to make any financial gain from doing so, you must seek your own permission of the copyright holder before reproducing.  Details of copyright law can be found on the Links page.
 

Technical Bits

The museum is best viewed on a desktop or tablet at this time.  Even though it was built on a desktop, it is particularly stunning (though I say so myself!) on my Ipad.  Most functions work on a mobile phone, but it is a bit harder to see.

Each device, depending on its size and shape, presents the data differently.  Presentation and navigation will differ from device to device.  Please bear with us whilst I try and optimise the website for all users. I felt it was better to share a small but growing library of museum exhibits and library items as well as we could, than wait the full two years we expect to fill it with everything we already know about!  As of 20/7/21, I reckon we have now shared about half of the content I am aware of. We could use more volunteers in all areas, but especially to help write articles, scan documents and classify items for the library.

Accessing the museum pages, and browsing the library should work for all on all devices, assuming they can display jpg and pdf filetypes.  Please let us know if you are experiencing problems navigating to, or accessing any documents or photos.
 

Searching Our Library From Within Each Museum Article*
 
*Library search functions do not work on all devices, and you must sign in to a google drive account to use - so for the non-technical out there, I would recommend you stick to clicking on the library folders and browse content in that way.  But, using search is a powerful way for the more serious historian to look through our dataset.

Our researched articles make use of only some of the photos and documents we have stored. 
 
If you have a google drive account, you can use predefined library searches at the bottom of each museum article.  They open in a new window, which you can close when you have finished.  When you first access the heritage library, it can take 24 hours to build the indexes to it, so please be patient - the feature may well return less results than expected for a time.
 

Try Searching Our Museum Library (Google Drive account users only)

Can You Help Us Improve The Museum?

  • Do you have any related personal memories, photos or documents that you can share with us?

  • Can you help us improve the museum?  We need your help to collect and capture resources - hunt out photos, interview residents, research and create new articles; to curate content - scan and clean images, classify and file them; share with the community - through the maintenance of this website, presentations to schools and community groups, and more.

  • Do you have any suggestions on ways we could improve the museum, or preferred priorities for its development?

  • Contact us at healdgreenheritage@gmail.com, or via our Heald Green Heritage Facebook Page.

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