Welcome to Kegworth Heritage Centre

Chairman's update - Spring 2025

By the time you read this the clocks will have changed and we’ll be heading towards Easter. We can now confirm that we’ll open for our 2025 season on Easter Saturday (19th April) and then again on Easter Monday (21st April). I still have to pinch myself occasionally when I think about where we were before last Easter and how far we’ve come. This year at least we feel more confident that we will have some visitors! It was very anxious waiting for the first people to arrive last year but once the ice was broken it was wonderful to be able to welcome a steady stream of people, not just that first weekend but right through the season.

This year we’ll have twice as much for you to see now that the second floor will be open again. Some of your old favourites will be on show again. The Saddlery and agricultural pieces will be back looking better than ever. The school display has been reimagined and this year will feature an exhibition from Kegworth Primary School pupils. This has been a joint initiative between us and will be the outcome of a competition to create pictures and models of Radcliffe Power station to accompany a new display celebrating the story of the site.

There’ll also be a new exhibition celebrating some of the sports clubs and societies that feature so much in many of our lives. Even as I’m writing this, the volunteers have a list of displays they are working on, and even I don’t know what exactly will be in the final mix. If you did visit last year, this year will be a different experience. What won’t have changed is our approach to keeping an open and airy space with opportunities to interact with many of the items in the collection. There will be new activities for younger family members - although I know that some of our older visitors had just as much fun with last year’s quiz and Kaggi search and from what I understand you’ll enjoy this one just as much, if not more!

Unfortunately, our upstairs area isn’t accessible unless you can manage a staircase (and sadly, that’s not likely to change because of the limitations of our building) but we are working on ways to bring the upstairs downstairs through the power of the digital world.

KHC is very much still a work in progress. We have a great vision of where we’re going and what we need to do to get there. It would be fantastic to say that the only limitation is our imagination. Sadly, that’s never the case for any museum, especially not a volunteer led one like ours. We need people to help us realise the dream and we need money to pay for it. We are now able to take payments by card so there’s no need to fill your pockets with cash to be able to support us! That’s especially the case if you’d like to join our Friends of KHC scheme which you can do when you visit.

Finally, some of you may have noticed the new tagline on the banner for this page - Building the connections between our past, our present, and the future - this is what KHC is all about. We're trying to tell the stories about our past and how they link us to how we live today, and even to help us understand where we're going in the future. We'd love to hear your stories when you come and visit, and we're looking to run a new project this year to start to immortalise some of those Voices of Kegworth.

We're really looking forward to seeing you this year!