Wenhaston Archive Project
Begun in September 2007 by a small group of local residents led by Arthur Musk, initially to build a website recording farming in and around Wenhaston, this project rapidly escalated to a much bigger plan bringing together photos, documents and memories of village life over the years. Public exhibitions were held with the invitation for anyone to submit their cherished documents for recording. No documents were retained but were returned to their owners - there is no physical 'collection'. Instead all items were scanned. This enabled some of the images to be appreciably digitally enhanced when compared with original but damaged documents and photographs. Scanned images were captioned where possible and uploaded to the dedicated website where they were alloted to relevant sections and headings.
This project was initially managed by a small committee who freely gave their time and skills, together with support by the Wenhaston-based website company Blythweb Ltd, staffed by village residents, who hosted the impressively extensive website that resulted, displaying over 2,000 images. No public funding or support from any bodies either within or outside the village was forthcoming and as the original committee fragmented Blythweb Ltd continued to support the website. This could never be a long-term arrangement, with fears for the future of such an unfunded large website which would be enormously difficult to replicate once defunct.
In 2016 the charity Southwold Railway Trust expressed interest in becoming guardians of the Wenhaston Archive website (Wenhaston being one of the stations on the Halesworth-Southwold line which operated 1879-1929, and the site of the only Southwold Railway road level-crossing).
People from around the world with family links to Wenhaston have delighted in seeing the Archive and may now continue to do so.