Scriptorium Tag

Good ideas schemed up during a bout of insomnia don’t usually seem so clever next morning. But when I tried out on colleagues my nocturnal fancy for a local history contribution to this year’s Gloucester History Festival, they were enthusiastic, so now it will be in the programme and I am committed to making it work. In case you missed it, last year’s festival was an outstanding success, a vibrant, stimulating and joyous celebration of city, county, and history generally. This year’s, from 2-17 September, promises to be even better.

My idea, dubbed Scriptorium Tag, is to assemble a group of fellow local historians from among the ranks of the Victoria County History, local universities, and other friends and colleagues, to participate in a kind of relay of short, pithy and lively lectures, which will run non-stop through an afternoon and evening in the Scriptorium range of Gloucester’s admirably historical Blackfriars. Each presentation will touch on some aspect of Gloucestershire’s history, about which the speaker is an authority, and they will run in roughly chronological order. The ‘tag’ line will be that the last sentence of one lecture becomes the first sentence of the next, rather like the baton in a relay race. Intended to be informal and entertaining, as well as high-octane local history. We shall encourage our audience to come and go, eat and drink, question and heckle even, as the fancy takes them. Please come along, Thursday 14 September.

John Chandler,

Consultant Editor, VCH Gloucestershire

Visit https://www.victoriacountyhistory.ac.uk/counties/gloucestershire for more information