Oxfordshire History Centre

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Oxfordshire History Centre

We're the archive and local studies centre for Oxfordshire. We are part of Oxfordshire County Council. Thank you for reading the above and visiting our page.
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29/05/2026

Today we are saying a fond farewell to Mark Priddey, who is retiring after 38 years at Oxfordshire History Centre (previously Oxfordshire Record Office).

His career in Oxfordshire has seen a rise from part-time archivist to History Service Manager. During that time, he’s helped to oversee the successful move of the service from the basement of County Hall to our present home of St Luke’s in Cowley. He was instrumental in the History Centre attaining Archive Service Accreditation in 2015 (and in the years since!). Along with co-ordinating a popular series of History Days, he’s contributed to countless talks and outreach events and collaborated with a wide range of heritage colleagues, local history groups, depositors and community groups.

Mark has made a major contribution to opening up Oxfordshire’s history to the public, having catalogued a whopping 350 archive collections and taken in around 500 new accessions!

A familiar face in our public searchroom for the last few decades, his wide-ranging expertise has proved invaluable to both researchers and fellow History Centre staff.
He’s also been a fantastic manager to us for many years and will be greatly missed.

All of us at the History Centre wish him all the best for a well-earned retirement.

08/05/2026

For the last two weeks, Oxfordshire History Centre has had a UCL Archives and Records Management Masters student working with us on her cataloguing placement.

We’re pleased to say that she has really enjoyed her time with us, particularly using our Collections Management System ‘Epexio’, and learning about and arranging the Culham St Gabriel’s Trust records.

The institutional records relating to Culham Educational Foundation, St Gabriel's Trust, and their merged organisation Culham St Gabriel's Trust (CSTG) have now been catalogued, documenting the governance and operational activity across both trusts. Culham Educational Foundation was established following the closure of Culham College, a Church of England teacher training college in Oxfordshire, in 1979. Similarly, St Gabriel's Trust was formed after the closure of St Gabriel's College in Southwark, London in 1978.

Our UCL student processed the collection by removing original wallets, folders, and paper clips, and replacing them with brass paper clips and acid-free packaging to support long-term preservation. The collection was then referenced, reboxed and fully catalogued using Epexio.

28/04/2026

Z is for Zoo in our A-Z of ephemera.

We’ve reached the final (and somewhat tricky) letter in our A-Z. Not to be defeated, we’ve chosen ephemera relating to zoos!

Oxford Zoological Gardens (sometimes known as Kidlington Zoo) were located at Gosford Hill, on a site now largely occupied by the Thames Valley Police Station. The zoo was only active for a short period, opening in 1931 and closing in 1937. The animals were then moved to Dudley Zoo.

A few photographs and advertisements survive in our collections, featuring some of the animals held at Oxford Zoo. These included a lion, a tiger, wolves, monkeys, cattle, penguins and a wide range of other birds. The most famous animal associated with the zoo was Rosie the elephant – a sculpture of Rosie now stands on Kidlington roundabout, not far from the original zoo site. A map from the zoo’s guidebook provides a site layout, including office areas and animal enclosures.

16/04/2026

Decorated documents

The average written document found in an archive is perhaps not dazzling to look at! Their value is often in the information they contain. However, this is not always the case – many examples exist which are highly decorative or feature intricate illustrations.

Royal Charters, such as the 1568 Charter of Incorporation for Henley Borough (pictured), can be very ornate. This particular charter includes both brightly coloured illustrations and borders and an example of ‘historiated initials’, where a letter contains an illustration telling a story or depicting a scene. Here, the initial ‘E’ of Elizabeth contains a portrait of Elizabeth I on the throne.

Amongst common deeds, an ‘Exemplification of a Common Recovery’ is particularly elaborate. These documents were used to break entails and allow land to be exchanged more freely by means of a ‘fake’ court case, where both parties were colluding to reach a particular outcome. The grand-looking documents typically feature a large wax common seal along with decorative borders and lettering.

More frequently, we find simpler decoration in documents within our collections. Often this consists of enlarged lettering, letters featuring added illustrations (known as ‘inhabited initials’) or various flourishes in ink. This is normally applied to the first letter on a deed, page or paragraph, and can mark a division between different sections in a page of text. Although such decoration is traditionally hand drawn, it was occasionally continued in pro-forma printed records. For example, printed forms in the Diocesan collection include initial letters highly decorated with a lovely floral design.

‘Illuminated manuscript’ refers to the practice of using bright colours or metallic pigments to literally ‘illuminate’ the page. Miniature illustrations and decorative borders can also grace these works. They are far more common in the medieval period and in religious texts. We have very few examples in our collections - these examples have often survived because fragments have been recycled and form part of later documents. The earliest volume of parish overseers’ accounts for Whitchurch, dated 1569-1595, is bound in a piece of pre-Reformation liturgical manuscript bearing illuminated lettering.

27/03/2026

The clocks go forward this weekend.

The History Centre’s home is St Luke’s Church in Cowley, and one of the more unusual tasks for one of our archivists is adjusting the two clocks on our tower. After climbing several floors via the tower staircase to the top of the building, there’s then a vertical ladder to contend with! The two clocks get manually adjusted using their rather lovely old winding mechanisms. Fortunately, the rest of the clocks in our building require much less effort!

25/03/2026

Calendars and Old and New Style dating

A number of major and somewhat complicated calendar changes took place in 1752.

Before that time, the Julian calendar was used in Great Britain. Inaccuracies in the design of this calendar resulted in a calendar year that was slightly longer than the natural solar year. Over the centuries this tiny discrepancy accumulated, and by the 1750s the calendar was 11 days out of alignment with the solar year. Change was needed and the Calendar (New Style) Act of 1750 was passed. As a result, the more accurate Gregorian calendar was introduced in 1752. The timing of leap years was restructured, and the problematic discrepancy was removed by ‘skipping’ 11 days that September and going immediately from the 2nd to 14th September. The 3rd to 13th September 1752 never technically took place!

A second major change concerned the start of the legal year. For many centuries, the legal year started on Lady Day (25th March) and ended on 24th March. When the calendars were changed in 1752, the beginning of the year in England was officially moved to 1st January. Scotland had already made this change in 1600.

These changes cause a number of issues when it comes to interpreting dates on documents...

• Pre-1752 official records are typically dated according to the old legal year, which deviates from our modern notion of when a year starts and ends. For example, 3rd December 1710 comes before 3rd January 1710 under the old system – remember, 1711 didn’t start until 25th March! The system can be seen most clearly in records listing events chronologically, including some parish registers (pictured)

• The Gregorian calendar had been introduced in other European countries as early as 1582, and the shift in the start of the year sometimes even earlier. This meant that for over a century, a document written in France might bear a quite different date to one written at exactly the same time in England

• Although the ‘legal’ year started on 25th March, the concept of the year commencing on 1st January was also understood and in common use by the ordinary people of England before 1752. Therefore, creators of English documents would sometimes record a date with the day, month and both versions of the year. This was known as double or dual dating and would only need to be applied to dates between 1st January and 24th March. An example can be seen on the pictured marriage bond, dated 22 March 1745/6

Our modern archival policy is to record years according to our current calendar. When cataloguing, archivists will typically 'roll' dates between 1st January and 24th March, on official documents written before 1753, into the next year. A document dated February 1702 may therefore be in our catalogues with the year as 1703 – although it was still 1702 for the writer, by our modern understanding we were already a couple of months into 1703. In handwritten archive catalogues in particular, ‘double dating’ by recording both ‘old style’ and ‘new style’ dates can often be seen. Alternatively, ‘O.S’. or ‘N.S’. is sometimes used to indicate the dating convention.

The legacy of the old calendar can still be seen reflected in the fiscal or tax year, which used to end on the old ‘new year’s day’, Lady Day. When the official calendar changed, it was decided that taxation should continue to be based on the old year. And when those 11 days were skipped in September 1752, this shifted the end of the tax year from 25 March to the 5th of April.

18/03/2026

We’ve recently added a large Oxfordshire Quarter Sessions name index to Heritage Search.

The Quarter Sessions was the county’s main court for many centuries. It dealt with criminal cases including theft and assault, along with having administrative roles touching on the Poor Law, the payment of county officials and oversight of county institutions and infrastructure. A court was held four times per year (hence ‘Quarter’ Sessions) and the papers created or deposited during each session were bundled up into 'sessions rolls'. These rolls have since been partially dismantled and placed in archival boxes. Records include bills, jury lists, indictments, recognizances, calendars of prisoners, sessions orders and examinations of witnesses (depositions). Certificates of Conviction issued summarily by local Magistrates around the county were deposited with the Quarter Sessions and can also be found within the bundles. Records don't cover Oxford City, which had its own Quarter Sessions.

Multiple indexes to these county records were originally compiled by hand in the early 20th century by Canon Oldfield, a local clergyman and historian. His volumes can be found on the shelves in our searchroom. The name index includes the majority of people who appear in the Oxfordshire Quarter Sessions rolls from 1687 up to 1830. The index is arranged by surname, and gives the person’s forename, town or parish, the type of document they appear in, and the year and session (Epiphany, Easter, Trinity or Michaelmas) where the original document can be found.

Our staff started inputting this data in July 2022 to make it more widely available and keyword searchable. The finished index comprises just over 72, 000 entries and will be a great resource for family historians. The index up to 1830 can be found here: https://heritagesearch.oxfordshire.gov.uk/indexes/qs.

Quarter Sessions rolls beyond 1830 were never indexed by Oldfield – we’ve been gradually cataloguing these in detail and are currently up to 1868! The post-1830 rolls can be searched or browsed on Heritage Search here: https://heritagesearch.oxfordshire.gov.uk/collections/quarter_sessions?orderBy=refNo.

09/03/2026

An exhibition to commemorate the men from South Oxford who died in the Second World War will be at the Westgate Library, Oxford, from Thursday 12th to Monday 30th March.

'42 Men of South Oxford 1939-45' builds on last year’s popular exhibition '24 Men of Grandpont and Cold Harbour 1939-45' by including new research on the men from the adjacent parish of New Hinksey.

The exhibition gives a fascinating insight into the war and how it affected one small suburban community. Visitors can learn about what Oxford – and South Oxford – were like in this period, about women’s roles and wartime evacuees, and discover the stories of the local men who went to fight, their families and neighbours.

Free and open to all during normal library hours.

04/03/2026

How to… locate a grave

One of the questions we are frequently asked is how to locate an ancestor’s grave.

How and if you can do this using our resources depends on a number of factors. Were they Church of England? Do you know which parish they belonged to? When did they die? Were they wealthy or not?

Burial Registers:
If the person was Church of England but you don’t know where in Oxfordshire they were buried, its best to first search the Oxfordshire parish burial registers. Many burial registers for pre-1974 Oxfordshire are digitised and available to browse or search online via Ancestry (up to 1965 at latest). If you don’t have a subscription, it is available on the PCs at the History Centre, or in Oxfordshire Libraries. The Oxfordshire Family History Society’s ‘Search Suite’, indexing substantial parish register data, can also be consulted at the History Centre, along with printed transcripts of many parish burial registers.

In most circumstances, if you find the details of an individual in an historic parish burial register they would have been buried in that parish’s churchyard. There are exceptions - for example, some churchyards have long been closed for new burials including many central Oxford parishes which used specific suburban burial grounds from the 19th century onwards due to lack of space in the city.

It’s important to remember that registers record burial services but don’t typically indicate anything about specific grave plots. In many cases, especially for older burials, the churchyard is as close as we can get to identifying the grave location.

Monumental Inscriptions:
For some parishes we also hold indexed lists of gravestones and memorials known as ‘Monumental Inscriptions’. These have typically been compiled in recent decades by volunteers surveying churchyards. As such, they are just based on surviving gravestones. If the person you are searching for wasn't relatively well off they may not have had a headstone, so it’s unlikely any record exists giving a burial plot. The same would be true for many burials from centuries ago, where stones have not survived or are illegible. If you do find someone in a monumental inscriptions list, this should give you a plot number or location – sometimes rough plans are included as a guide to where to look in the churchyard.

If we don’t hold a monumental inscriptions list for a parish, it’s always worth checking with the church directly, particularly for more recent burial information. If you aren’t local enough to Oxfordshire to visit us, access to a rich database of transcribed parish register and monumental inscription data (BOND) is available remotely through a paid membership to the Oxfordshire Family History Society, https://www.ofhs.uk/new-contributions/what-is-in-bond.

For non-C of E burials, we have fewer resources. If someone was interred in a civil cemetery or crematorium, it’s often necessary to contact the organisation which runs it, such as the local Town Council. However, grave registers can occasionally be found within our deposited parish council or borough collections. For Oxford City, grave registers for the major cemeteries of Rose Hill, Headington, Wolvercote and Botley list burials and plots from the 1890s onwards and can be browsed on the PCs at the History Centre. We hold limited burial registers for a small number of other religious denominations or institutions, but rarely hold monumental inscriptions

25/02/2026

A small collection of papers has recently been catalogued relating to Oxford’s Victorian-era public baths, https://heritagesearch.oxfordshire.gov.uk/records/O247.

In February 1850, a public meeting was convened proposing the establishment of public baths and wash-houses for the City of Oxford. These baths and laundries were a charitable enterprise, aiming to benefit the poorer inhabitants of the city at a time when inadequate sanitation and repeated outbreaks of cholera were contributing to many deaths. A survey of six central Oxford parishes showed 1300 families had insufficient access to washing and drying facilities for linens, and 538 families no access at all.

Funds were raised by subscription, and the institution was overseen by a committee of trustees comprising gentlemen of the City and University including William Brunner, Coroner, and Dr Henry Acland. Land in St Peter-le-Bailey parish was gifted by the City of Oxford, and the baths erected on a site bounded by Brawner's Alley and Castle Street. They were reported to have cost around £2765, a large part of which was supplied by Mr P.B. Duncan, Esq., Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum.

The institution opened to the public in 1852 but immediately met with catastrophe. An opening ceremony took place on 7th June attended by the Mayor and Aldermen. It concluded just before midday and members of the public were allowed in. Some 10 to 15 minutes later, an explosion was heard. One of the boilers had burst, causing the collapse of an adjoining chimney and parts of the walls. According to newspaper coverage at the time, several people were seriously injured by falling bricks. A 9-year-old boy, Tom Burchell, was killed, and one of the boiler stokers, John Wordsworth, died later in hospital. The coverage suggests that a more serious loss of life was avoided – if the accident had happened a few minutes earlier, the falling debris may have descended on the larger assembly of public and dignitaries attending the opening ceremony.

The baths and laundries provided some public good in the years they were in operation, attracting 139,359 bathers and 100,756 washers between March 1853 and July 1863. However, they struggled financially. The hope of the managing committee that they would become a self-supporting public institution was dashed, as they increasingly fell into debt. The laundries were closed in 1863. The baths survived for almost 17 years until they were finally closed in March 1869, with debts at around £1000.

Address

St Luke's Church, Temple Road, Cowley
Oxford
OX42HT

Telephone

01865 398200

Website

https://www.oxfordshire.gov.uk/oxfordshirehistory

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