After a prolong absent I’m back at last.
Recently though, always being a bit of a tech lover I took on some Websites Administration and after designing another website from scratch plus the purchase of a up to date new laptop gave me a reason to look back at the abandoned blogs. So, I thought lets get myself a proper domaine name and get back to it. So here I am...and what to write....well it's Ramblings from the 'Boro so we'll start with the History Society news would be appropriate.
Last Thursday evening “Himself” and I took ourselves in to Town to a meeting of the Local History Society. Wherever Ive lived I delved into the local History of the area. History was one of my favourite subjects all those eons ago at school, and in one form or another has remained so all my life. It actually took us a long time to actually join the Peterborough Local History Society but after attending their Annual Charity talks in the Town Hall for several years we took the plunge and went along to a meeting.
This evening we were expecting an interesting talk from the speaker, Mr Toby Wood, Vice Chairman of the Peterborough Civic Society. His subject was Peterborough’s Blue Plaques.
The Civic Society was set up in 1952 to campaign for the protection and preservation of Historic buildings and monuments. They aim to work with Public authorities to care for the City’s future, by promoting good design, campaigning to save our local heritage buildings and other features and to promote public interest.
From 1985 to 2012 The Civic Society had placed 28 metal aluminium Plaques around the City. They commemorated the City’s historic people or historic buildings. Each plaque had quite a bit of reading information engraved on it. The problem was over the years a few have disappeared when buildings were demolished, many have suffer wear and tear and many were erected in places where it was impossible to read them.
In 2015 the Civic Society made a decision to replace the old plaques with a new design following the heritage design of the London Blue Plaques. These Plaques are more visual to the public. They were erected to enhance the City centre and form a trail that can be further enhanced with a leaflet giving more information on each plaque. So far a total of 20 plaques have been put in place. The Civic Society are planing more and have invited the public to make suggestions. There are restrictions though. With people they have had to have been dead for over 50 years. This rules out many famous people for some time to come yet. People such as Edmond Hockeridge and Ernie Wise. Even Henry Royce of Rolls Royce who was connected to Alwalton cant be included because Alwalton is not actually part of Peterborough. Its part of Huntindon albeit some 20 miles along the A1. Other people such as Edith Cavel were connected to buildings in the Cathedral Precincts. And the Cathedral are planing their own Blue Plaque trail within their grounds.
The program took 3 years to implement. From deciding which plaques to replace, the information on them, the colours, the fonts, getting permission to erect them in the chosen location. Costing over £300 each, they were cast and hand painted by a Derbyshire Architectural signage casting company. They are cast from an amalgamation of metal and plastic making them useless to metal thieves.
