Everyday Histories: The Stories That Usually Don’t Make the History Books
Updated: Aug 25
A Pair of Shoes for a Poor Child
When we think about history, it is tempting to think big.
Kings and queens. Great buildings. Wars and political upheavals. Famous architects, wealthy landowners and people whose portraits hang on walls.
Tavistock certainly has plenty of those stories.
But who remembers the child who needed a new pair of shoes? The policeman dealing with the everyday dramas of a changing town? The families who lived above shops, worked in local businesses and crowded the pavements of Bannawell Street?
Their lives mattered too.
And that is the idea at the heart of the national theme for Heritage Open Days 2026: Everyday Histories.
Putting ordinary lives back into the story
Our programme this September spans more than a thousand years of Tavistock's history.
We will encounter powerful figures including Ordgar, Ordwulf and Ælfthryth and explore the great Benedictine Abbey that transformed the fortunes of Tavistock. We will visit remarkable buildings, investigate architecture and industry, and discover the people who exercised power and influence.
But running alongside those stories is another history.
It is the history of ordinary people living ordinary lives.
Often they left no grand monuments behind them. Instead, we find them in parish records, account books, letters, police reports, census returns, old photographs and memories handed down through families.
Sometimes all it takes is one tiny detail to open a window onto an entire life.
A Pair of Shoes for a Poor Child
That idea lies at the heart of Dr Sue Andrew fascinating Heritage Open Days talk, A Pair of Shoes for a Poor Child.
Drawing upon records from 1762 to 1903, Sue explores the lives of people in communities around Tavistock including Dunterton, Bradstone, Lamerton and Brentor.
These records reveal a world of agricultural labour, poverty, illegitimacy and changing attitudes towards education and welfare.
A simple reference to providing shoes for a poor child suddenly raises much bigger questions.
Who was that child? What circumstances did their family face? What did poverty actually mean in a rural Devon community? Who decided that help should be given?
The great events of history may provide the dates, but details like these reveal how people actually lived.
When an old letter speaks again
Documents can also bring us startlingly close to individual voices.
The Superintendent's Letter takes an episode preserved within Tavistock's policing history and turns it into performance.
Instead of simply looking at an old document in an archive, we encounter the personalities and circumstances behind it.
It is a reminder that official records were created by real people dealing with real situations. Behind the formal handwriting are emotions, disagreements, humour, authority and the everyday business of keeping order in a community.
For a few moments, a voice from Tavistock's past speaks again.
The street that made Tavistock
And sometimes the archive is all around us.
Thousands of people travel along Bannawell Street every year, but how many stop to consider the lives that have unfolded there?
Our new Heritage Open Days walk, Bannawell Street: The Street That Made Tavistock, grew from the Tavistock Area Support Services Life Stories project.
It explores not simply buildings, but the people who inhabited them: the shops and businesses, working families, neighbours and everyday activity that made Bannawell Street such an important artery in the life of the town.
Look carefully enough and an apparently familiar street becomes something quite different.
It becomes a landscape of people's lives.
History hidden in plain sight
That same idea runs throughout this year's Heritage Open Days.
Our walks explore burial grounds, waterways, wharves, churches and streets. Tavistock Museum, the Police Museum, Tavistock Library, the Subscription Library and other local organisations open doors onto different parts of our shared past.
Our family activities explore what working life might have meant for miners, market traders and stonemasons.
Even Rediscovering Tavistock Abbey is not simply about medieval architecture. Behind the surviving stones were monks, servants, craftsmen, tenants, pilgrims and countless other people whose names may have disappeared but whose lives formed part of the Abbey's story.
That is why Everyday Histories matters.
History isn't only something that happened to famous people.
It happened in our streets, our workplaces and our homes.
It happened to people who worried about money, brought up children, went to work, fell in love, argued with their neighbours, grew old and occasionally needed someone to buy their child a pair of shoes.
And together, those lives made Tavistock.
Come and discover their stories
Heritage Open Days takes place from 11–20 September 2026, with more than 40 FREE talks, walks, tours, exhibitions, open days and family activities across Tavistock.
Some bookable events are already filling quickly and some may now appear fully booked.
Please don't give up if the event you want is full. Join the waiting list. Plans change and places can, and regularly do, become available.
Download the complete Heritage Open Days programme, choose the stories you want to discover and reserve your places as soon as possible.
This September, we're celebrating a thousand years of Tavistock.
Not just the people who made the history books, but the people who made the town.
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