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.
One of the first references to a school for young ladies in Peterborough comes in the form of an advert in the Stamford Mercury for Mrs Horden's Boarding School. For 14 pounds 14 shillings per year the young lady could have board, English teaching and needlework lessons. Dancing, writing and music were, of course, an additional cost.
It is difficult to know which girls' school was definitely the first in Peterborough. The first for boys, The King's School, was founded in the reign of Henry VIII, but girls were not deemed to need educating, unless they were wealthy. They were educated in skills that were seen to make them more attractive and have more chance of marrying.
In the Georgian period Dame schools started to appear. These were schools run by women to teach girls useful skills like sewing and dancing, as well as reading, writing and simple maths. The girls usually boarded with the women running the schools in large houses. Unlike modern boarding schools the number of girls would have been relatively small and dependant on the size of the building.
Bacon's Boarding School
Mrs Elizabeth Bacon was the headmistress of the first girls boarding (Dame) school in Peterborough. The first record of the school is from 1753. She ran the school until 1770 after which when Miss Searle took over as head teacher. (1)
Other Dame schools included Mrs Horden's (see other entry) and a girls school run by Miss Mary Smith in 1791.
(1) D.K. Shearing, Education in the Peterborough Diocese Following the 'Glorious Revolution' 1688, (unpublished PhD Thesis, University of London) p289 via http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/10018490/1/121273.pdf