John Brookes. Weddington Castle webmaster
It seems hard to believe, but the Weddington Castle website has now been around since 2005 - ten years ago!
Whilst in historical terms ten years is the blink of an eye (elsewhere on this site you'll find a history of the Weddington area going back to 500,000,000 BC!) in terms of the Internet it is quite some time.
Of course, the site has developed and evolved over the years and whilst the original website now looks pretty dated, at the time it was quite innovative - it even won a BT Design Award! You can still see the original site floating around the Internet at this link: http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/weddcastle/
I just wanted to give a little history lesson myself, if I may, to shed some light on how the Weddington Castle website first came about.
As a young child growing up in Weddington in the 1970s, I was already fascinated by castles and history - I think I spent more time daydreaming about knights and dragons than in the real world! It slowly dawned on me that there was a 'Castle Road' just down the road from me. Why was it called Castle Road when there was no Castle? At first I thought it must be a reference to the grand house across the way - The Grove, or the Weddington Hotel as it was then known (later the 'Fox & Crane' pub and now converted to apartments) - and I always thought the two stone posts by the Weddington Post Office looked like the possible gateposts of a Castle...
In the end two chance occurrences alerted me to the existence of a much more extensive - but sadly lost - building that was demolished in 1928...
Firstly I chanced upon a print of the true Weddington Castle in the Nuneaton Bookshop. It was an extraordinary moment to see an actual image of a building that I had assumed lost to history. The Bookshop owner mentioned the print was from a local historian named Alan F Cook. Secondly, I discovered the Nuneaton Library and - in those pre-Internet times - suddenly a whole new world opened up for me; a world where through books I could travel through time and space by simply browsing the shelves and turning the page of any book I found there... One of those books was by Alan F Cook (that name again), in the history section. It was entitled 'A revised geology, geography and history of WEDDINGTON, in the County of Warwick' ...
With that discovery Weddington Castle became more than just a street sign and a sepia-toned photo. It became a real place where actual people had lived, loved, worked and died.
It was a real part of history. I lived on land where the Castle estate had stood. In a way this magnificent building was part of MY history.
I set about scanning and copying as much information as I could - often resorting to handwriting words from historical references and typing them up on a typewriter (yes, an actual typewriter) later. The more I looked the more information seemed to come my way - an exhibition at the Nuneaton Museum was put on showing Weddington Castle as a Red Cross Hospital in World War One and my parents obtained the deeds to our house which included a copy of the Will of Henry C Shawe (former owner of the Castle). This led me to Shawe Avenue and the Castle crest still preserved there at numbers 1 and 3. And crucially (I forget how, in that pre-Google era), I was able to make contact with Alan F Cook. Alan kindly provided me with some further images of the Castle which I still have to this day and which are viewable in the Gallery section of this site. I should say at this stage that without Alan's help and previous research this website would simply not exist.
My next dilemma was what to do with all of this material? I had a vague notion of writing a book of my own on the Castle, in the form of a sort of pseudo-guide book along the lines of the guide books I always purchased from the many castles and halls I liked to visit. However, life intervened and I went off to university and the files remained in a folder back at my parents' home in Nuneaton.
In the years that I was away studying, and then working, in the 1990s something significant happened however. The Internet began to creep into the lives of the population, slowly at first but then more and more rapidly. By the turn of the millennium, computers had become such a key part of everyday life that the world was gripped by fears of the 'millennium bug' shutting down computers across the globe at midnight on January 1st 2000 and plunging the world into chaos as a result!! It seems daft now but it shows how much we had become dependent on this new technology by then.
However, with this new technology also came new opportunities. As the Internet became more and more accessible and websites started to spring up - basic by today's standards, but revolutionary at the time - it occurred to me that perhaps there might be a solution to my dilemma of how to put my various files on the Castle together in one place. I retrieved my paper files and began to research how to put together one of these new-fangled websites. This involved teaching myself a strange new code system called HTML (I won't go into detail here) and soon I was putting basic websites together. Eventually I reached a point where I felt able to set up a website, and I began to type up the words and scan in the pictures from my earlier files. The end result was the first version of 'Weddington Castle - An Online history' which was pretty much as per the link above. This launched on 3rd January 2005.
The implications of using a website to present this material, rather than a written book, were and still are massive:
With the explosion of social media since the site launched in 2005, a whole new - and much more interactive - dimension has been added to the website. Suddenly, through Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc, I am able to communicate directly and in real time to people across the globe - an especially useful facility since I emigrated to Australia in 2012!
Facebook is particularly valuable and Weddington Castle now boasts a dedicated Facebook page and a Twitter feed. Facebook groups such as 'Nuneaton Memories' deserve a special mention here - as well as providing access to let people know about this site, there is a wealth of historical information and imagery on the page, which currently has over 7000 members.
And social media is not just about groups, it is about individuals. I can't thank enough the people who have taken the time to like or comment on the Weddington Castle posts on Facebook - there are too many to mention, though a special acknowledgement must go to Cathy Stogsdill Weddington, our stalwart supporter from the USA, and my mum Jenny Brookes - who since my migration is effectively the UK coordinator of information for the website!
But of course, technology is always evolving, always changing, at ever-faster rates. This meant that by 2013 the Weddington Castle website was out of date and was in serious danger of becoming redundant as it was built upon a platform that was no longer supported (MS FrontPage, which Microsoft had discontinued). As a result, the massive task of transferring all the data and images etc to a new platform had to be undertaken in a very short space of time.
The opportunity was taken at this time to update the look and feel, as well as the navigation, of the website and the result is the site that you see today. For those who are interested, the website is now hosted on the Weebly platform. Of course all internal page links etc had to be updated as well, and there may still be some out of date links on here which were missed - if you find any please do let us know at: info@weddingtoncastle.co.uk.
Web technology continues to evolve and this website will continue to evolve with it. As well as regular updating of the content of the site - and I am always staggered by new information and discoveries on the Castle that continue to crop up even after all this time - you will notice the increasing use of embedded videos as well as photos, for instance.
One can't help but wonder what the former owners of the Castle - which was demolished in 1928 - would have made of the website. Would the residents of the Domesday-era village of 1086 (then known as 'Watitune') have thought it witchcraft? Would the owners Humphrey Adderley in the 1500s or even Lionel Place in the 1800s have been able to comprehend that people from around the world could be reading about them centuries later? And what would Henry Cunliffe Shawe, owner of the Castle in the Victorian era, have made of his image being viewable in an global online gallery, accessible at the touch of a button in everyone's homes, over a century after his death?
Unless technology extends to a time machine in the future we will never know the answers to these questions. I suspect the nearest thing we will ever have to a time machine is the ability to preserve and maintain the memories and images of the past that are now lost to us in real terms. But who knows? Perhaps in another ten years' time the Weddington Castle website will be an interactive 'virtual reality' experience!
One final point. I believe that history is as much about the present and the future as the past. With this in mind it is nice to know that the Weddington Castle website has been chosen to be preserved by the British Library in their archives; so hopefully this little piece of history will remain for others to look at and build upon long after I have become a little piece of history myself...
I wish to extend my sincere thanks to all who have journeyed into cyberspace to contribute, support and visit the online hallways, chambers and grounds of the Weddington Castle estate over the years. Here's to the next ten years, whatever they may bring!
Regards
John Brookes
Webmaster, Weddington Castle
ps: renowned local cartoonist Noel Ford (who has an exhibition on at the Museum and Art Gallery from 3rd October thru to November guys!) so kindly produced this artwork above to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the www.weddingtoncastle.co.uk website. Thank you Noel
Whilst in historical terms ten years is the blink of an eye (elsewhere on this site you'll find a history of the Weddington area going back to 500,000,000 BC!) in terms of the Internet it is quite some time.
Of course, the site has developed and evolved over the years and whilst the original website now looks pretty dated, at the time it was quite innovative - it even won a BT Design Award! You can still see the original site floating around the Internet at this link: http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/weddcastle/
I just wanted to give a little history lesson myself, if I may, to shed some light on how the Weddington Castle website first came about.
As a young child growing up in Weddington in the 1970s, I was already fascinated by castles and history - I think I spent more time daydreaming about knights and dragons than in the real world! It slowly dawned on me that there was a 'Castle Road' just down the road from me. Why was it called Castle Road when there was no Castle? At first I thought it must be a reference to the grand house across the way - The Grove, or the Weddington Hotel as it was then known (later the 'Fox & Crane' pub and now converted to apartments) - and I always thought the two stone posts by the Weddington Post Office looked like the possible gateposts of a Castle...
In the end two chance occurrences alerted me to the existence of a much more extensive - but sadly lost - building that was demolished in 1928...
Firstly I chanced upon a print of the true Weddington Castle in the Nuneaton Bookshop. It was an extraordinary moment to see an actual image of a building that I had assumed lost to history. The Bookshop owner mentioned the print was from a local historian named Alan F Cook. Secondly, I discovered the Nuneaton Library and - in those pre-Internet times - suddenly a whole new world opened up for me; a world where through books I could travel through time and space by simply browsing the shelves and turning the page of any book I found there... One of those books was by Alan F Cook (that name again), in the history section. It was entitled 'A revised geology, geography and history of WEDDINGTON, in the County of Warwick' ...
With that discovery Weddington Castle became more than just a street sign and a sepia-toned photo. It became a real place where actual people had lived, loved, worked and died.
It was a real part of history. I lived on land where the Castle estate had stood. In a way this magnificent building was part of MY history.
I set about scanning and copying as much information as I could - often resorting to handwriting words from historical references and typing them up on a typewriter (yes, an actual typewriter) later. The more I looked the more information seemed to come my way - an exhibition at the Nuneaton Museum was put on showing Weddington Castle as a Red Cross Hospital in World War One and my parents obtained the deeds to our house which included a copy of the Will of Henry C Shawe (former owner of the Castle). This led me to Shawe Avenue and the Castle crest still preserved there at numbers 1 and 3. And crucially (I forget how, in that pre-Google era), I was able to make contact with Alan F Cook. Alan kindly provided me with some further images of the Castle which I still have to this day and which are viewable in the Gallery section of this site. I should say at this stage that without Alan's help and previous research this website would simply not exist.
My next dilemma was what to do with all of this material? I had a vague notion of writing a book of my own on the Castle, in the form of a sort of pseudo-guide book along the lines of the guide books I always purchased from the many castles and halls I liked to visit. However, life intervened and I went off to university and the files remained in a folder back at my parents' home in Nuneaton.
In the years that I was away studying, and then working, in the 1990s something significant happened however. The Internet began to creep into the lives of the population, slowly at first but then more and more rapidly. By the turn of the millennium, computers had become such a key part of everyday life that the world was gripped by fears of the 'millennium bug' shutting down computers across the globe at midnight on January 1st 2000 and plunging the world into chaos as a result!! It seems daft now but it shows how much we had become dependent on this new technology by then.
However, with this new technology also came new opportunities. As the Internet became more and more accessible and websites started to spring up - basic by today's standards, but revolutionary at the time - it occurred to me that perhaps there might be a solution to my dilemma of how to put my various files on the Castle together in one place. I retrieved my paper files and began to research how to put together one of these new-fangled websites. This involved teaching myself a strange new code system called HTML (I won't go into detail here) and soon I was putting basic websites together. Eventually I reached a point where I felt able to set up a website, and I began to type up the words and scan in the pictures from my earlier files. The end result was the first version of 'Weddington Castle - An Online history' which was pretty much as per the link above. This launched on 3rd January 2005.
The implications of using a website to present this material, rather than a written book, were and still are massive:
- Firstly, it meant that I could organise and add to content on an ongoing basis; as more and more information and updates became available - whereas a book would have to be reprinted and reproduced for each update.
- It also meant that I could reproduce, at high quality, all of the images I had - making for a much more visual account of the Castle, and truly bringing this long-gone building to life.
- With the use of the Internet there were no print costs for me, and no purchase costs for anyone interested in the site.
- This meant that I could reach people around the world, with few restraints, and indeed I started to get visitors from as far afield as the US, Japan and Australasia. Crucially, through email (another revolution!) it meant that people could reach ME. In the years since the setting up of this website I have been amazed and delighted by the many people who have taken the time to contact me and send me images, recollections, updates and encouragement for the Weddington Castle website. I would like to make a special mention to local historian Peter Lee of the Nuneaton Local History Group on this count.
With the explosion of social media since the site launched in 2005, a whole new - and much more interactive - dimension has been added to the website. Suddenly, through Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc, I am able to communicate directly and in real time to people across the globe - an especially useful facility since I emigrated to Australia in 2012!
Facebook is particularly valuable and Weddington Castle now boasts a dedicated Facebook page and a Twitter feed. Facebook groups such as 'Nuneaton Memories' deserve a special mention here - as well as providing access to let people know about this site, there is a wealth of historical information and imagery on the page, which currently has over 7000 members.
And social media is not just about groups, it is about individuals. I can't thank enough the people who have taken the time to like or comment on the Weddington Castle posts on Facebook - there are too many to mention, though a special acknowledgement must go to Cathy Stogsdill Weddington, our stalwart supporter from the USA, and my mum Jenny Brookes - who since my migration is effectively the UK coordinator of information for the website!
But of course, technology is always evolving, always changing, at ever-faster rates. This meant that by 2013 the Weddington Castle website was out of date and was in serious danger of becoming redundant as it was built upon a platform that was no longer supported (MS FrontPage, which Microsoft had discontinued). As a result, the massive task of transferring all the data and images etc to a new platform had to be undertaken in a very short space of time.
The opportunity was taken at this time to update the look and feel, as well as the navigation, of the website and the result is the site that you see today. For those who are interested, the website is now hosted on the Weebly platform. Of course all internal page links etc had to be updated as well, and there may still be some out of date links on here which were missed - if you find any please do let us know at: info@weddingtoncastle.co.uk.
Web technology continues to evolve and this website will continue to evolve with it. As well as regular updating of the content of the site - and I am always staggered by new information and discoveries on the Castle that continue to crop up even after all this time - you will notice the increasing use of embedded videos as well as photos, for instance.
One can't help but wonder what the former owners of the Castle - which was demolished in 1928 - would have made of the website. Would the residents of the Domesday-era village of 1086 (then known as 'Watitune') have thought it witchcraft? Would the owners Humphrey Adderley in the 1500s or even Lionel Place in the 1800s have been able to comprehend that people from around the world could be reading about them centuries later? And what would Henry Cunliffe Shawe, owner of the Castle in the Victorian era, have made of his image being viewable in an global online gallery, accessible at the touch of a button in everyone's homes, over a century after his death?
Unless technology extends to a time machine in the future we will never know the answers to these questions. I suspect the nearest thing we will ever have to a time machine is the ability to preserve and maintain the memories and images of the past that are now lost to us in real terms. But who knows? Perhaps in another ten years' time the Weddington Castle website will be an interactive 'virtual reality' experience!
One final point. I believe that history is as much about the present and the future as the past. With this in mind it is nice to know that the Weddington Castle website has been chosen to be preserved by the British Library in their archives; so hopefully this little piece of history will remain for others to look at and build upon long after I have become a little piece of history myself...
I wish to extend my sincere thanks to all who have journeyed into cyberspace to contribute, support and visit the online hallways, chambers and grounds of the Weddington Castle estate over the years. Here's to the next ten years, whatever they may bring!
Regards
John Brookes
Webmaster, Weddington Castle
ps: renowned local cartoonist Noel Ford (who has an exhibition on at the Museum and Art Gallery from 3rd October thru to November guys!) so kindly produced this artwork above to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the www.weddingtoncastle.co.uk website. Thank you Noel
