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.
The Great Eastern Soldier’s and Sailor’s Rest Room opened on Christmas Eve 1915 at Peterborough East Railway Station. The rooms were managed by the Women’s United Total Abstinence Council (WUTAC), supporters of the temperance movement popular at that time.
During the first nine days alone, 321 servicemen called at the tea room. They were given food, drink and an opportunity to rest in comfort whilst waiting for their trains to and from the front. The ladies who managed the tea room encouraged the men to write in the visitors’ books, only two of which have survived from 1916 and 1917.
There are over 590 signatures in the books that reveal the servicemen came from across the United Kingdom and as far away as Australia. They wrote messages of gratitude, poetry and drew pictures expressing their appreciation for the service that the ladies were providing. These two slim volumes provide a brief insight into the thoughts and feelings of the men transiting through the city during the Great War.
The books have been digitised and transcribed and the servicemen’s personal histories researched in an effort to tell their story and trace their families.