Wiltshire at War: Community Stories has received £74,400 from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) for an exciting project to gather and share stories exploring the impact of the First World War on Wiltshire.
Led by a partnership of Wiltshire Council, Trowbridge Museum, Chippenham Museum and the Athelstan Museum in Malmesbury, a series of community exhibitions will be created looking at life across Wiltshire 100 years ago. These will be accompanied by a range of activities in libraries and schools.
Working with their local museum or heritage group, communities across Wiltshire will not only have the chance to host one of the touring exhibitions, school or library displays, but also help shape them. Communities will be invited to share their stories of Wiltshire during the First World War, to help create a record of how the conflict affected life across the county.
The project will run for the next five years, with funding from the HLF until 2016, to help create opportunities for as many communities as possible across the county to take part in Wiltshire at War: Community Stories. This could be by sharing family records with a local museum, taking part in an activity at school, attending a talk at a library or hosting one of the touring exhibitions. As well as all this activity on the ground, the project will also have a dedicated website sharing all the community stories that are gathered.
One of our first tasks will be to recruit a project officer to help deliver the project. More details of this and how you can be involved will be posted at www.westbury.ourcommunitymatters.org.uk
