Support the VCH in Gloucestershire

The VCH set of volumes for this county has not yet been completed. Editorial work came to a temporary halt in October 2010, when the previous funding arrangements ceased.  To remedy this, a county support trust, the Gloucester County History Trust, was formed in April 2010 (registered charity no. 1138520). The Trust's funds were given a significant early boost through a sponsored walk in June 2010 undertaken by David Smith, a former county archivist for Gloucestershire. Fundraising continues, in line with a business plan adopted by trustees in February 2011. 

Thanks to the support of many individuals, greatly assisted by a substantial grant from the Bristol & Gloucestershire Archaeological Society for 2011-12 and 2012-13, work on the partially-completed VCH Gloucestershire Vol. XIII restarted in October 2011.  The remaining research and writing-up is planned to take two years, on a part-time basis.

With the next two years of work now planned and funded, the emphasis for fund-raising is now on the period from autumn 2013 onwards.

The Trust calculates that up to 20 further volumes will be needed to cover the historic county of Gloucestershire, and has established provisional costings for this work (see next para). This will help inform funding bids and local target-setting.

Gloucestershire: future work, and how much it might cost

To get an idea of the amount of work still to be done in the county, and inform future fundraising strategies, the Gloucestershire County History Trust has worked out indicative costs for covering the remaining 150+ parishes. We have done this by starting with a basic calculation of size – acreage x population – then putting each parish into one of three broad categories: simple rural parish, complex rural parish, small town. Using local knowledge, we assign a degree-of-difficulty factor.

Guided by the typical number of pages given to places in each category in already-issued volumes, we can then make a reasonable estimate of pages to be allocated to future parishes. From that we can derive indicative costs for each piece of work. We stress that these are indicative only (and reflect only the county-based research and writing up, not publication).

However, the estimates are very helpful in shaping tactical decisions about what can be done with available funds, and how future fundraising might be approached. Finding (say) £250,000 to do a complete hundred of 20 parishes is definitely daunting, but finding £10-12K over 3 or 4 years to do a single parish is much more within the realm of the possible.

In the attached Word doc below, we show the possible contents of a further 18 volumes (about two per historic hundred) and our page and cost estimates for each parish. NB, no estimates for Bristol are included at this stage - the work is beyond our practical planning horizon.

The trust continues to actively seek further funding

You too can support the VCH in Gloucestershire by making either a one-off donation, or a regular standing order, to the Gloucestershire County History Trust, using the pdf form at the foot of this page.

Meanwhile, if you would like to support the continuation of VCH work nationally, please consider donating to the central County History Trust.

Your donation could fund research and the writing of parish or urban histories by full-time historians and volunteers, who also will contribute their discoveries to our Explore website.

Please consider getting involved with VCH research into your own town or village, and in fundraising for work to start there.

For more information, please contact info@victoriacountyhistory.ac.uk.