Guarding the Night Sky
The Gainsborough and Saundby WWI Airfield When people think of Gainsborough’s industrial past, they think of Marshall Sons & Co., the Britannia Ironworks, Roses and packing machines. Aviation doesn’t usually make the list. But for two years between 1916 and 1918, a field on the Nottinghamshire side of the River
Adam Stark: Gainsborough’s Victorian Man of All Trades
In 1842, the compilers of Gainsborough’s trade directory faced a small problem when they came to record Adam Stark of Market Place. He held so many roles that they had to make a choice about which to list first. They settled on the most official, Post Master. But tucked alongside
The Night Marshalls Burned
How a midnight blaze at the Britannia Ironworks shook Gainsborough to its foundations It began at midnight. By the time the people of Gainsborough had gathered in the streets, the north-eastern corner of Marshalls was a raging furnace, and the end of Spring Gardens was blocked by fallen walls. The
Who dies when a town gets sick? What the burial registers can tell us.
What two centuries of Gainsborough burial records tell us about the diseases that shaped the town, and how to read a plague from the age of the dead. In August 1832, the vicar of All Saints in Gainsborough, George Beckett, opened his burial register and, in the right-hand margin, began
Life on the Trent – Gainsborough’s River of Fortune and Danger, 1821–1841
The River Trent was the making of Gainsborough. For centuries it had carried the town’s commerce south to the Humber and out to the North Sea, bringing coal and groceries upriver and taking grain, wool and manufactured goods down. By the time Adam Stark began keeping his newsbooks in May