05 May 2023

Local and Community History Month is a month-long celebration of local and community history that takes place across the UK. Organised by the Historical Association, activities occur across the country every May to raise awareness and highlight local history. 

Here at TfW, our heritage work aims to conserve, protect and promote our rich heritage and that of the places and communities we serve, whilst also implementing sustainable impact practices throughout the transport sector. This represents a significant step forward in our ongoing efforts to create a more socially sustainable and culturally responsible transport network that benefits the environment and the people and communities we serve.

Transport has played a crucial role in shaping the diverse history and shared heritage of Wales and the Borders. The initiative takes a holistic approach to heritage, encompassing not just the built environment but also the historical and cultural significance of sites and communities. To achieve our goals, we’re collaborating with academia, heritage and community groups, and other organisations to identify, conserve, safeguard and sustain heritage as well as promote sustainable impact practices that create value, enact positive change, and deliver measurable benefits that can be sustained over the long term.

Everyone lives in an area of rich local and community heritage, even if they don’t know it yet!

May is the month to investigate, explore and discover the history of the world immediately around you. We’ve compiled a list of great places to start researching focused on transport local and community history.

• Explore your family history & railway ancestors. Get started here
• For staff records of railway companies in England and Wales, visit the railway staff record guide at the National Archives
• Do you have Railway Ancestor, or think you may have? Want to find out more about a different aspect of local and community history in your area? Or just interested in finding out more about life on the railways? Then check out Railway Work, Life & Death. The project is a joint initiative between the University of Portsmouth, the National Railway Museum (NRM), the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick (MRC) and amazing volunteers across the UK who are making it easier to find out about railway worker accidents in Britain and Ireland from the late 1880s to 1939. The project has a searchable database about who was involved, what they were doing on the railways, what happened to them and why.
• Maps are vital to local and community history and a great place to start looking at railway communities & transport links over time.
• Transport created, forged & shaped local communities across Wales and the UK. Take a station area & see how it changed using newspaper, periodicals and journals, census records and building/house histories.
• Search local archives in the Welsh Archive Repositories and the Online Catalogue

Our transport and active travel networks also offer a wide range of opportunities to explore history and heritage from trails to castles to historic landscapes. Get started here.