Our Journey presents stories from the Big Bang to the present day in a digital format for everyone to enjoy both during this very special year and beyond.
Public
As residents and visitors, we invite you to explore a showcase of the most interesting, poignant, bizarre, hilarious and impactful stories of the past, as well as submitting your own stories, past and present, to add to the ever changing and colourful fabric which is the story of the city.
You can join in by creating you own ‘Our Journey’ account from August 2018, to submit stories to be published online as well as create your own custom timeline.
Schools
For schools, we are launching a comprehensive, digital place-based curriculum. This has been developed through significant consultations and workshops with historians, curriculum specialists, and teachers from across the city.
From September 2018 we invite our schools to explore and discover the city’s past through images, poetry, music, text and film extracts that have been hand-picked by our teams to accompany this completely unique suite of local resources which celebrates Peterborough’s heritage whilst supporting almost all areas of the national curriculum.
Perkins engineering was founded in a small office in Peterborough, UK, in 1932. It was founded by two men, Frank Perkins and Charles Chapman; Frank a superlative salesman and Charles an engineering genius. Their focus was on the diesel engine and their belief that it could revolutionise the motor industry with high performance and low running costs. Peterborough was the perfect place to start the business as it had excellent transport links and so could ensure rapid delivery of products.
Its first high-speed diesel engine was the 4 cylinder Vixen followed by the more powerful version, the Wolf. With its success in the motor industry it expanded into the agricultural industry.
During the Second World War Perkins was instrumental n its production of diesel engines for the war effort.
In 1947, production was moved to the Eastfield site in Peterborough.