‘Our Street at War’ on HistoryPin

Egham Museum’s ‘Our Street at War’ project is now on HistoryPin. The museum was awarded £1,700 from the Heathrow Community Fund to launch the project to commemorate the First World War. ‘Our Street at War’ aims to convey the personal stories and local sacrifices of the war by mapping its impact street by street.

The project has two components, each designed to make the extensive research carried out by local volunteers more accessible for visitors, researchers and pupils:

-Using HistoryPin, an award winning history mapping website, we have plotted the impact of the war directly on the map of our local communities, allowing visitors to the site to see how the war effected individual streets.

-The map is then being complemented by a series of five articles on our website, looking at Egham’s experience of the First World War in more detail, drawing upon our newspaper archive.

In keeping with the museum’s role as a teaching museum, specialising in providing opportunities for young people to gain experience and develop skills, the project is being managed by Steven Franklin and supported by Claire Kennan, both Royal Holloway postgraduate students.

Through this project we hope to enable local residents to explore at a more intimate level the impact of the war upon their street, that local pupils and students will be able to explore the local dimension to the international conflict they are studying and that the personal stories and sacrifices of local families will be brought to light.

We also hope this project will encourage local residents to contribute their own stories, photographs, postcards and letters to build upon the work started by this project, creating a genuinely community generated archive of our local experience of the First World War material.