Hook Norton inevitably derives its character and identity from the past – its own past as a community, the past of the wider world it lives in, and the individual pasts of the people who have lived here. This History website is intended to provide interesting and pertinent information about those pasts, through thoughtful articles, imaginative re-creations and perhaps, in time, a treasure house of original material. This introductory Home Page first provides guidance to the contents, and then to the organisations that created this website.
The Website offers you distinctive articles (in the form of PDFs) organised into distinct sections, and the sections are grouped together into five main areas:
- GATEWAY, besides this Home page, provides a guide to the structure and arrangement of the website, and recommends some of the best reading available on Hook Norton. Links on the right.
- APPROACHES offers three things:
- Some general introductions and broad surveys of our local history.
- Guides for readers to explore the village for themselves and discover its surviving physical heritage.
- Access to the many interesting films and sound recordings made about the village in the last eighty years.
- EPOCHS provides a chronological coverage of the village’s origins and development through five distinctive periods.
- THEMES covers the many-sided social, economic, religious and other aspects of the village and parish, especially since 1800.
- APPENDICES provide valuable extra information and perspectives.
To view the contents of each section, simply click on the headings on the list on the right to enter. When you have finished with a PDF, either use the back button, or go to the Introduction to any section to take you to material that helps set the context and find supporting items. Alternatively, consult the all-embracing Table of Contents.
Opportunities to learn more about Hook Norton history are provided by two key groups in the village:
The Hook Norton Local History Group (HNLHG) is the creator of this website, as part of its mission to recover and preserve the history of this village and to spread knowledge and appreciation of its larger meanings among the public at large. For details of its publications and its popular programme of monthly talks between September and May, go to Hook Norton Local History Group
The Village Museum and Archive is housed alongside the Brewery Museum in the Visitor Centre at the Hook Norton Brewery, and both museums are open whenever the Centre is open. Please see Village Museum & Archive
The HNLHG is happy for people to make links to this site and to use such material as belongs to the History Group, as long as proper acknowledgement is made. But please note that the copyright to the individual articles rests with the individual authors, and copyright to the photographs and artwork rests with their creators.
The History website remains fundamentally the work of the team named below, who, together with the incomparable Roy Meadow, created it in 2015. We revised and extended it in 2020-22, with the continuing support of Noel Bell and Emma Kane, who have made it possible for us to work within the main village website. As it stands, the History website is far from complete, it remains a work in progress, and should be expanded in the future. For that to happen, we welcome constructive suggestions and offers of help!
Editors: Gill Geering and Donald Ratcliffe
June 2022
