Shopping In and Around Market Harborough Digital Project

The digital project has recruited the interests and skills of a small team of volunteers, each getting involved in researching, writing and digitising collections by scanning and photographing. We’ve started to compile fact files on areas with significant importance, photographs, historical facts and its connections to Market Harborough, all of which will form part of the digital archive.

The first phase of looking into the history of the building of Harborough Museum has begun with interesting finds related to retail and the Liberty corset. We’re also coming across shop bills, invoices and magazine advertisements from the town and its surrounding villages, some of which have been photographed and added to the digital map of Market Harborough – still very much a work in progress!

The other aspect to this project is the close proximity to the Grand Union Canal and Foxton village in particular, providing an opportunity to explore the ‘Retail on the Waterways’ angle.

Once this information has been documented, we then plan to focus on editing oral history files, so it can be added to the computer map archive. The Twitter and Flickr streams are up and running too, where you can keep up to date with the project progress and take a sneak preview of the archive photographs.