 | a bibliographical newsletter Issue 41 June 2026  |
This page last updated 16 June 2026.
Exeter City Council's Culture and City Centre strategies
This issue has been published now because the consultation period for two important Exeter City Council strategy documents is nearing its close. Both are significant for the future of the Westcountry Studies Library, which has barely been mentioned in the documents listed below. The sorry tale of Exeter's public heritage collections is told in Nobody knew what they were.
Cultural strategy key documents
- π Exeter City Council. Exeter cultural strategy 2026-31: the city of creative confidence. Exeter : Exeter City Council, 2026. 23 pages ; 21x30 cm. PDF document.
- π InPlace Consulting. Exeter cultural strategy 2026-31: a baseline report of the cultural city we know. Exeter: Exeter City Council, 2026. 45 pages : colour illustrations, maps 21x30 cm.
- π InPlace Consulting. Exeter cultural strategy 2026-31 : an assessment of what you said to us. Exeter : Exeter City Council, 2026. 38 pages ; 21x30 cm. PDF document.
- π Exeter City Council. Strategic Director Place. Exeter Cultural Strategy 2026 – 2031 Public Consultation: report to Executive. Exeter : Exeter City Council, 2026. 6 pages ; 30 cm.
The closing date for submission of the survey is 29 June.
City centre strategy key documents
- π Exeter City Council. Exeter : our city centre. Exeter City centre strategy 2026-2031. Exeter: Exeter City Council, 2026. 21 pages : colour illustrations, map ; 21x30 cm. PDF document.
- π Exeter City Council. Exeter City Centre Strategy 2026 – 2031 Public Consultation : Equality Impact Assessment (EqIA). Version 1. Exeter: Exeter City Council, 2026. 8 pages ; 21x30 cm. Docx file.
- π Exeter City Council. Strategic Director Place. Exeter City Centre Strategy 2026 – 2031 Public Consultation : report to Executive. Exeter: Exeter City Council, 2026. 6 pages ; 30 cm. Docx file.
The closing date for submission of the survey is 29 June.
THE VISION of the Cultural Strategy includes the following:
Theme 1: How we think and act. Actions. Co-ordination: The Council to enable a cultural sector forum to share best practice, expertise and forge partnerships, ensuring alignment between the Cultural Strategy and other city-wide strategies, visions and place branding.
Comment: Co-ordination is not as advanced in Exeter as in other places. In Plymouth the Record Office and Museum share premises in The Box, while there is a local studies library and major theatre nearby. In Barnstaple the Devon Record Office, Libraries Unlimited and the North Devon Athenaeum, supported by local authorities in North Devon provide an integrated service in a town centre building. In Hull the University and the public library and the record office provide in the Hull History Centre an integrated service with professional staff from the University and library authority manning the desks in the library and the record office search room, with spaces for group work, exhibitions and meetings. In Cornwall Kresen Kernow provides an accessible local history service in Redruth which is described in more detail below.
Theme 2: Connecting with our grass roots. Actions. Spaces: Work with local businesses to bring vacant shops and other spaces into use to support the creative industries. Encourage meanwhile uses which support cultural activity.
Comment: There is a widely expressed need for a centrally located cultural hub as a location for cultural organisations, a tourist information centre, booking office, public heritage and local studies library, media gallery for heritage images and documents, research and study spaces for individual and group learning, lecture and conference facilities perhaps adjoining a city-centre theatre to rival Plymouth’s. Existing empty premises could be sought as interim sites to house the emerging hub until a purpose-built centre might be constructed, perhaps on the old bus-station site. The Civic Centre, Telephone Exchange or the many empty retail premises in the city centre are possible sites. This also sits well with the City Centre Strategy.
Theme 3: Unlocking accessibility and wellbeing. Actions. Access: Improve access to cultural experiences and provide welcoming and safe spaces.
Comment: A key element here is to move the region’s largest literary heritage resource, the Westcountry Studies Library, back into the city centre rather than it remaining three miles away on an industrial estate. A tourist information centre is required in the heart of the city – not many people arrive in Exeter by canal these days, where they will find a small desk only available when the Custom House is open.
A final thought: should the strategy include, perhaps as a supplement, a listing of Exeter and Devon-wide cultural assets that have been identified by research? There seems to be little reference to the Devon Heritage Centre and South West Heritage Trust, for example. Many county-wide organisations are based in Exeter – the Devonshire Association, Devon Archaeological Society Devon Trust for Nature Conservation and Devon Family History Society, to name but four.
Kresen Kernow (Cornwall Heritage Centre)
I visited Kresen Kernow in Redruth, where I spoke at a conference “Print, printing & industrial heritage” and was astounded at the contrast with the Devon Heritage Centre. Here the archives (Argh in Cornish) are to be found together with the local studies library, merged in a modern building near the town centre (admittedly a smaller town than Exeter). There is no charge for using the service except for the provision of scans or copies of documents, and the archives search room and the local studies library are both staffed by qualified archivists and librarians. Volunteers are used, particularly in conservation work, and there are conference rooms, spaces for visiting school and other groups and a changing exhibition on the ground floor – during the conference the theme was “Cornwall in print”, including printing and bookbinding artefacts from local museums. The centre is accommodated in what was a local brewery, long a ruin but retaining as much of the old granite and iron structure as possible. It is fully accessible to all – the welcome guide is also in large print, "easy read" and widgit – and it was well-used during the conference. There are no slopes, and lifts to all floors. It should certainly be visited by those drawing up Exeter’s cultural strategy.
- Ian Maxted. Printing and publishing of science and industry for the Westcountry to 1800. This has been published in draft at Exeter Working Papers in Book History: Publishing science and industry, Westcountry to 1800
- Kathryn Conder (Independent researcher): Henry Rogers and the Siege of Skewis. Contemporary accounts of an incident in June 1734 when Henry Rogers took unlawful possession of a house at Skewis, a tiny hamlet near Redruth, which had been his ancestral family home. He barricaded himself and his family inside and refused to leave. Following the siege, Henry Rogers was arrested, tried at the Cornwall Assizes in August 1735, and ultimately executed.
- Charlotte Mackenzie (Independent researcher): Local printing in Georgian Cornwall. This continued Ian Maxted's account into the 1820s including women in the book trades such as Elizabeth Elliott of Falmouth.
- Ian Alcock (Independent researcher): Developments in interactive children’s books in early Victorian England. These moving figure books reached their heyday in late 19th century Germany, but had precursors in London in the 1860s, notably Dean and Son.
- Lisa Peters (University of Chester): Victorian Newspapers and the Mining Industries of Cornwall and Swansea. Coverage was analysed for the later 19th century and it was found that it was much more extensive for the Cornish tin and copper mines than it was for the coal mines serving the Copperopolis of Swansea where the ore was taken for smelting.
- Alastair Tinto (Independent researcher): Danescombe Paper Mill, Calstok, Cornwall. An excellent account of the mill by a local researcher, showing the business interests of Plymouth merchants after it was founded in the 1780s.
- Sallie Morris (Science Museum, London): Colour lithographs of Cornwall: the printing of railway company posters.
- David Osbaldestin (Birmingham City University): Walking through the industrial past of Nineteenth Century Birmingham.
- Georgina Grant (National Museums of Scotland): The importance of iron to the printing industry and its allied trades
- Sue May (Independent researcher): A partial solar eclipse in Turner’s line-engraving of Dudley, Worcestershire (1835). Interesting in that it posited that Turner's attitude to industrialisation was positive rather than negative, perhaps because it gave him such colourful sunsets. It also discussed the symbolism of sun, moon and stars. Several times he showed both sun and moon in the sky but this eclipse, shown in an industrial landscape, is curiously positioned, both in the engraving by Wallis and the original watercolour.
- Rosie Smith (Birmingham City University): ‘One of the best works of the kind.’ How did the Coalbrookdale Company convey quality through their printed materials?
- Deborah Sutherland (Victoria and Albert Museum): The use of innovative materials and printing techniques in the early twentieth century. This included the use of cellophane from the 1930s to print on transparent flaps.
- Juul Uilenreef (University of Glasgow): Letterheads as Industrial Archives: Visual Records of Maastricht’s Urban Landscape. This showed the false impressions that were conveyed by many letterheads. Publicity often enhances the size of buildings, sometimes adding an extra storey, or a chimney belching smoke.
- Jay Kerslake (University of Leeds): ‘The living voice is mighty, but we were few’: trade union periodicals in early twentieth century Britain. This included mining and agricultural titles and also The woman worker : official organ of the National Federation of Women Workers, published monthly between 1907 and 1910.
- Ian Maxted spoke on his gathering of imprints of the firm of Wheaton of Exeter who published more than 1,000 schoolbooks from around 1900 to 2020, none of which are to be found in Exeter libraries and his comparative study the the world of the book in three European regions (see below).
- Barry Mackay spoke on his work on The shepherd's guides, established around 1817 when a sheep farmer in Martindale, Joseph Walker, had the idea of collecting and publishing wool marks of sheep as a guide to shepherds to distinguish the farm and owner of sheep.
- Bob Oldham, in a video from America, spoke about his massive World Handpress Database, asking for those who knew of unrecorded examples to report them.
Two stray publications
These emerged from separate contacts by American correspondents and investigation proved to be intriguing:
1. Borwick, Mary Hasell. Escapades of an American youngster / by Mary Hasell Borwick ; illustrations by Percy Heard. Barnstaple : Sydney Harper and Sons, 1910. 92 pages, [1] leaf of plates : illustrations ; 21 cm. Copies: BL ; Bodleian ; Cambridge ; NLS.
The “ Escapades of an American Youngster” is the title of an interesting and beautifully got up volume, written by Mrs. George Borwick, wife of the Unionist Candidate, North Devon Gazette, 18 January 1910.
Mary Mason Hasell (born c. 1881), later known as Lady Borwick, was an American socialite, the younger daughter of Lewis Cruger Hasell, a prominent merchant from New York City. She married George Borwick, 2nd Baron Borwick on 7 December 1908 at Grace Church in New York City. The couple moved to London following their wedding. The “Escapades of an American Youngster” is the title of an interesting and beautifully got up volume, written by Mrs. George Borwick, wife of the Unionist Candidate, reported the North Devon Gazette, 18 January 1910. Income was intended to benefit the North Devon Hospital and its appearance at that time would clearly enhance the appeal of the Unionist candidate. The marriage was short-lived and ended in a widely reported divorce in 1913. Mary was granted the divorce on the grounds of "cruelty and misconduct". Following her divorce, she married Adrian van De Sande-Bakhuysen (1874-1951) around 1915.
George Borwick, 2nd Baron Borwick of Hawkshead (1880-1941) was adopted Unionist candidate May 1909. Early in 1910 the couple were spending time in the south of France, presumably for health reasons. "We understand that Mr. George Borwick, barrister, of Fremington House, late Unionist candidate for the Barnstaple Division, who has been suffering from an attack of pleurisy for the past fortnight, is now much better". reported the Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, 22 March 1910. However he withdrew as candidate before the election, presumably on health grounds.
2. Boyd, John. The vision, and other poems, in blank verse / by John Boyd, a man of colour ; publishing for the author's benefit, and prefaced by some preliminary observations, by C.R. Nesbitt. Exeter : Printed by R.J. Trewman ; London : Longman and Co., 1834. 1 online resource (xix, 23, [1] pages ; 19 cm). (Slavery and anti-slavery: a transnational archive: Part I: Debates over slavery and abolition). Reproduction of the original from the Library of Congress. Reproduced courtesy of World Microfilms Publications. Reproduction available: Electronic reproduction. Farmington Hills, Mich. : Gale, 2009. Available via the World Wide Web. Access limited by licensing agreements. All six locations in JISC link to this online resource, accessible only to subscribers, including also the University of Exeter, and there is no hard copy recorded in the British Isles.
John Boyd was a free "man of colour" born on New Providence Island in the Bahamas. He was self-taught with beautiful hand writing. James Carmichael-Smyth Governor of the Bahama Islands, made him Clerk of visitors of the King's School. C. R. Nesbitt was among the minority of white Bahamians who believed that free blacks and persons of colour were entitled to be treated similarly to whites. In 1832 he had introduced a bill to grant them “all the rights, privileges, immunities, and advantages that they would have been entitled to" had they been born of white parents.
Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, 9 August 1834, page 4: The Vision, and other Poems. John Boyd, a man of Colour. Exeter : Trewman. London : Longman and Co. This small work is published for the benefit of the author, man of colour, of the Bahama Islands; and prefaced by some preliminary observations, with a view of showing that the African race are capable of enjoying the rights and privileges of freemen, and only require education to raise them to equality with the rest of their fellow-subjects. The only other reference traced is in the Halifax Guardian, 13 September 1834, page 1: THE VISION, and other Poems ; in Blank Verse. By John Boyd, a Man of Colour. 12mo.
And finally
As I draft this, it is sad to report Kyiv's Pechersk Lavra, the historic Cave Monastery has been badly damaged by Russian missiles. Printing in Kyiv began with the founding of the Kyivan Cave Monastery Press in 1615. The output of the press apart from liturgical literature traditionally included sermons, poems, original works on philosophy and theology. The printer Timofey AleksandroviΔ Verbickiy worked in the Monastery of the Caves 1621-24 and 1628-1635. In the mid-17th century, the press was managed by Innokentii Gizel’ (1620-1688), a prominent scholar and public figure. He was an author of a Synopsis, the first popular history of the East Slavonic nations. It remained the largest printing press in Ukraine until the mid-19th century. The Monastery of the Caves, founded in 1051, houses a book and print history museum, a museum of Ukrainian folk art, a theatre and film arts museum and the state historical library. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Contents of issue 40: January 2026
Shaping Devon's libraries. Devon, manuscript library catalogue, 1930s. The Newte Library, Tiverton. Kingsbridge map of 1586. The extents of Canonsleigh Abbey (the 2026 volume in the series of publications by the Devon and Cornwall Record Society). Exeter History Book Festival 2026, Countess Wear (a new Exeter Civic Society booklet).
