26 February 2015

The King's England: Nottinghamshire

I spent an industrious few weeks in December scanning a battered copy of The King's England volume on Nottinghamshire edited by Arthur Mee, converting the text to HTML, adding a large number of carefully chosen images (in addition to the ones in the book) and uploading the pages to my Nottinghamshire History website.

Mee's King's England series was an ambitious project to produce guides to the counties of England and 41 volumes were produced. Nottinghamshire: The Midland Stronghold appeared in 1938. Most of the research was undertaken by Mee's sister and her husband and Mee himself had a close connection with the county having been born in Stapleford in 1875.

There is an entry for virtually every town and village in the county and although the focus tends to be on the architecture of the parish church and local notable families or personalities it makes for a fairly interesting read. However, the content has been criticised by the author of the Suffolk Churches website for being 'verbose, sentimental. nationalistic and just plain old-fashioned inaccurate' and warns that if you read other volumes in the series 'after a while all England becomes a blur of romantic twaddle.'

See what you think!

No comments: