00:00Everyday History Heroes, it's a coming together of Find My Past and Heritage Open days.
00:06And what it's about recognising is that history is kept alive and heritage is maintained
00:10in this country very often by local groups, by volunteer groups, by friends of organisations.
00:15And it's perfectly possible for us to sort of live in an area and not actually recognise
00:20that there are these kind of local historical jewels until they are kind of advertised and
00:26promoted. So this is about recognising all the work that's being done, but also recognising
00:31that there are people who really are heroic in what they do. They keep our history alive.
00:35And they're the people who were at the heart of making history, not something which is kind of
00:40given to us by historians in ivory towers, but something that we ourselves do. All history is
00:45local and all history needs people in local areas, not just to care about it, but actually do something
00:50about it. And it's time that those people who use their time, use their energy to preserve and to
00:56promote our history and heritage. And that's what these awards are all about.
00:59Well, there are three sites up for contention in the Yorkshire area. There's the Hollybush
01:04Conservation Centre, which was one of the first places in Britain to commercially farm rhubarb.
01:09We wouldn't have rhubarb and custard and rhubarb crumble if it hadn't been for places like Hollybush.
01:14And at the heart of it is a man called Joseph Whitwell, a farmer. He was a kind of remarkable
01:19figure.
01:19But there's also a bit of a mystery to that site, because a series of defamatory letters,
01:24poison pen letters were sent to the farm in the 1880s. And the mystery of who sent them,
01:29that's actually been solved by the volunteers who've been recovering and maintaining the
01:37Hollybush Conservation Centre. And they're going to be revealing the answer to that historical
01:41mystery quite soon. Another site is the Otley Courthouse, which was a palace of justice,
01:47which is a place where justice was done. And it's now a community resource. It's a venue. It's been
01:51sort of transformed this kind of rather austere and kind of fearsome building into a place of kind of
01:57recreation and fun, a place where musicians and actors and comedians come to perform. And then
02:02there's the vastly Rehoboth burial grounds, which is one of a number of cemeteries that are recognised
02:08in the everyday history heroes. Because all over the country, we have these cemeteries in urban areas,
02:14because our cities were growing so fast in the 19th century. And they contain, of course,
02:18not just the graves, but the details, the stories of our ancestors. And more than 4,000
02:23people buried in the burial ground have been researched by the volunteers who've been maintaining
02:29it. I've got lots of connections to Leeds. My parents lived in Leeds in the 1960s. My sister
02:34now lives in Leeds with two of my nieces and nephews. It's a city I've been coming to my whole
02:39life. I studied journalism at Trinity All Saints University up in Horsforth and lived in Leeds,
02:46lived up in Roundhay for a year. It's also a city that we did a series of House Through Time
02:51in, up in Headingley. So I had another summer there a few years ago. So I'm very fond of Leeds
02:58and the area around it.
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