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.
Peter Peckard was the intellectual father of the movement for the abolition of the Slave Trade. Born in Lincolnshire in 1717, he attended Oxford University, served as vicar to several local parishes, and was an army chaplain for the Grenadier Guards. Peckard was an outspoken liberal, and by the 1770s spoke out in his sermons against the Slave Trade. In 1778 he published a pamphlet anonymously entitled ‘Am I not a Man and a Brother?’ articulating the arguments against the evils of slavery. The title of the pamphlet and the image on its front page became iconic for the abolitionist movement and were even used on china produced by Josiah Wedgewood promoting the anti-slavery cause. Peckard became master of Magdalen College in Cambridge in 1781, becoming Vice-Chancellor three years later. He started an essay competition for students on the subject of ‘Is it lawful to enslave the unconsenting?’ The first winner was Thomas Clarkson, inspiring him on his path to become one of the leading activists in the abolitionist movement. In 1792 Peckard was appointed as Dean of Peterborough Cathedral, a position he retained until his death five years later. He died fifteen years before the Slave Trade was outlawed in 1807.