My Heywood in History website has just passed a very unexpected milestone – one million pageviews!
Heywood in History started life back in April 2012 as 10,000 Years in Monkey Town*, a small sideline from my other history work, and a way to think about my hometown (which I left in 1988) when I felt a bit homesick.
In the beginning, I would have been pleasantly surprised just to see the total number of views get into five figures. It is after all a niche website about an obscure town. Heywood is only a small place with just less than 30,000 residents and is historically less notable than all its mid-sized neighbours.
For those who don’t know, Heywood was an insignificant rural part of Bury in the county of Lancashire for several centuries before it boomed as a cotton town during the Industrial Revolution and became its own municipality in 1881. After the decline of local industry, it was absorbed into Rochdale in 1974 (although locals still determinedly hold onto their identity as Heywoodites).
So, truth be told, the history of Heywood is relatively undistinguished and of little interest to those who have never lived there or have no family history connections to the town. Hence the surprise about one million views.
The biggest challenge with this project has always been writing about somewhere while living thousands of miles away from it. This means not being able to pop out and explore and photograph the places I’m writing about, or view the primary records from local libraries and archives. I’ve had to collect books and journals, trawl the internet for any reminiscences or snippets of records, and piece things together from afar. I think the result of this research is a decent overview of Heywood’s history, although in some cases missing some of the details that could be dug up from archives.
What I’ve always tried to do is place local events in a wider context, so we get a bit of history on the Bronze Age, Ice Age, Vikings, Romans, the earliest years of Heywood, the Elizabethans, the Civil War, Industrial Revolution, folklore, education and religion, the World Wars, and 20th-century decline. This reminds a general readership that local history is always intertwined with the bigger stories. There’s almost always a connection somewhere.
Beginning with one article (about the Bronze Age) and then gradually building up from there, there are almost 150 pages on the site now, with numerous draft articles still in the pipeline. I’ve also created several interactive maps, including one for the ‘Old Mills of Heywood‘ project. The end result will hopefully be a useful history resource that will be around for a long time to come.
Another result of my work was the recognition of the 750th anniversary of Heywood. The exact timing was uncertain, but sometime during 1260-71 A.D. a charter was signed in which Adam de Bury granted land to Peter de Heywood. This event, however, was largely forgotten to history. I contacted the Rochdale council hoping to get some commemorative activities in place for 2020, but after some initial progress, things went awry amid political defections and infighting in the council, and then of course along came Covid-19. The council did, however, did place a public history installation outside Heywood Library in February 2020 to mark the 750th.
Seeing the stats approach one million views came as a very big surprise, as I’ve not added too much to the website over the last couple of years. And as I said, it’s a bit of niche subject. There again, there’s not too much else around online on this history, so maybe it’s a bit of a ‘big fish in a small pond’ thing.
Anyway, I’m really happy that this little corner of Public History has done so well, and I’d like to thank everyone who has read the website and left some of the many lovely comments on there over the years. I have spread myself a bit thin with my different history interests recently, but hitting the million-views mark has motivated me to add more content to Heywood in History over the next year.
Thanks everyone.
* Why ‘Monkey Town’? Read this explanation.
Christopher Dawson 