A PRESENTATION BY JULIAN MUNBY, FORMER HEAD OF BUILDINGS AT OXFORD ARCHAEOLOGY
Julian Munby gave a presentation on behalf of The Historic Towns Trust, whose vision is for every town and city in Great Britain to have an authoritative atlas of maps and text that enables greater appreciation of the nation’s urban history and historic townscapes. Julian gave a very detailed presentation of how Oxford was able to produce their map and the important finds
that had been made. The presentation was well received and everyone was appreciative of Julian’s time and effort. Towards the end of the talk, Julian displayed some maps of Berwick and the map of Alnwick and Alnmouth, which helped the members visualise what the map of Berwick might look like.
An historic Map of Berwick
Giles Darkes will be the cartographer, who is renowned in his field and at some point, the Civic Society will be introduced to him
Julian and John Moore, former Collections Manager at the University of Glasgow and also a Trustee of The Historic Towns Map had met with some members of the Civic Society earlier that day to give some guidance and advice on how Berwick would achieve an historic Map of Berwick, Tweedmouth and Spittal. On visiting The Main Guard, they had seen that we already had a tremendous amount of information and the problem might be how we whittle this down.
To produce our map would require an amount of approximately £14,000 and this would be raised by the Civic Society through fundraising. A team/committee will have to be formed within the Civic Society to coordinate the project and it is hoped that the project from start to finish would take between 18 months to 2 years. This will not be an easy task, challenging at times and hard work, but hopefully with an excellent outcome.
It is the hope that Berwick Civic Society would be able to get the maps into the local schools, Alnwick Civic Society were able to achieve this and it has proved successful. It’s important that our younger generation learn the history of their local area and what part we played in the history of this nation.
Thanks must go to John Moore who has been the point of contact for the Civic Society over the past few months and will be the Trustee of The Historic Towns Trust responsible for this project; John was able to answer many of the questions raised before, during and after the meeting.
It was lovely to see how interested and enthusiastic the members of Berwick Civic Society were getting the project to fruition, now all we need are willing volunteers and of course the funds.