Support our work in Gloucestershire
You can support the Victoria County History 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 bottom of this page.
The set of VCH volumes for Gloucestershire is currently about half-complete; it's taken a century to do the first half, but we'd really like not to spend another hundred years finishing it! This is where you come in, by helping us to up the pace. Since 2010, when previous funding arrangements ceased, a county support trust, the Gloucester County History Trust (registered charity no. 1138520) has been busy raising funds, in line with a business plan adopted by trustees in February 2011.
Thanks to the support of many individuals, greatly assisted by substantial grants from the Bristol & Gloucestershire Archaeological Society for 2011-13 and 2015-16, work on the partially-completed VCH Gloucestershire Vol. XIII restarted in October 2011, and three new volumes are in hand. Eight years on we have published:
- Volume XIII - The Vale of Gloucester and Leadon Valley
- Yate (part of Volume XIV)
- Cheltenham Before the Spa (part of Volume XV).
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. This will help inform funding bids and local target-setting.
Future work and how much it might cost
To 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 help shape 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 three or four years to do a single parish is much more within the realm of the possible.