With the initial help of a donation of £10,000 by one of our members, Cheltenham Civic Society (CCS) is leading a campaign to produce a prestigious historical map of Cheltenham.
The map will be created by working in partnership with The Historic Towns Trust (HTT), which is a national charity that produces atlases and maps that display the history of British towns and cities.
CCS has already set up a project board led by Sarah Staniforth and Adrian Phillips, and including local historians, geographers, heritage experts and educators.
Adrian Phillips – Chair of the CCS Planning Forum – said: “These maps are beautiful and each one forms a fascinating and easily accessible record of the particular town’s history and heritage. Cheltenham thoroughly deserves one of these maps. Ours will be researched, designed and produced over the next year or two. It will be sold online via The Historic Towns Trust’s website – as well as by all good booksellers – and it will probably retail at around £12.”
The project board’s first task – which is already underway – is to seek and employ a project coordinator to pull together the information needed and work with the trust on the map’s preparation, with the trust’s cartographer producing the detailed artwork.
As well as appointing the coordinator, the project board has a target of raising a further £25,000 to cover the remaining cost of all the design and production work, plus community engagement and educational outreach activities following publication.
CCS member Colin Smith – who raised much of the funding for the Society’s successful WWI Battlefield Crosses Museum two years ago – has volunteered to undertake the fundraising for the map.
In the next few months he will be leading our efforts to secure a main sponsor for the map – with targets likely to include the major employers in the town.
The appointment of the project coordinator should be confirmed by the beginning of August, and that will be followed by a project launch event to be held at the Pittville Pump Room on 15th September as part of the Heritage Open Days festival.
Though the work might take longer, the project board’s aim is to complete the research and production work by summer next year, in time to publish the completed map in autumn 2027. An event to unveil the map has already been reserved during the LitFest in October that year.
The Historic Towns Trust has been in existence for over 70 years and is part of a Europe-wide programme. The atlases and maps they produce are of very high standard. They are beautiful productions in their own right and great tools for education and citizen engagement around local heritage.
The towns and cities that The Historic Towns Trust has produced maps for include: Bath, Oxford, Cambridge, Canterbury, Bristol, Swansea, Perth, Chester, Bradford, Coventry, Ipswich and Hull. Each map is produced through a partnership between the trust and a local group – such as a civic society or a historical society.
