Celebrating the Historic Towns Trust

Our team from the Atlas of London on the Eve of the Great Fire project, share their research findings

Here at the Historic Towns Trust we have had a very busy year, so we thought we’d take the opportunity to organise a celebration of our work. On the 22^nd October we invited partners, supporters and friends of the Trust to an evening event look at our recent and future projects and to hear about the impact we have had within the communities and cities we have worked.

Generously hosted at the Allies and Morrison Studios in Southwark, the evening included some short talks from our chair, Vanessa Harding, and trustee James Winterbotham, which highlighted the great projects we have completed in Bradford, Chester and Ipswich and also gave attendees a preview of work on our Atlas of London on the Eve of the Great Fire. Members of the project’s research team were there to tell people more about the atlas and what their research was discovering. We aim to complete work and publish the Atlas in 2027.

Attendees taking a look at our Swansea map

We were able to take the opportunity to showcase the outreach activities we have delivered over the last year, including walking tours and festivals in Bradford, education workshops in Chester and Bath and working with young people and community groups in Ipswich, where we also teamed up with the Urban Design Group at their annual conference. We were also able to show participants our new education pack, designed to enable teachers to use our Bath map to teach history, geography and other subjects within Key Stage 2 classrooms. We plan to use the Bath pack as a template for similar packs on Bristol, Chester, Ipswich, Bradford and future map projects.

Throughout the event, our maps were displayed around the studio, demonstrating the breadth of our work. Our maps will be shown in the window of the Allies and Morrison offices until the end of October 2025, so do go to 85 Southwark Street, London SE1 0HX, to see our range of maps, including examples of the publications we have released in the last year.

HTT Trustee, James Winterbotham, presenting our plans for the next year

We are incredibly grateful to all the staff at Allies and Morrison who helped us to deliver the event and to everyone who attended. If you would like to find out more about future events please sign up to our newsletter. Or if you would like to donate to our charity or support a specific project, please click here to be directed to our donations portal. All contributions, big and small, help towards the work of the Trust promoting urban history in Britain.