The Helmdon website, 1999–2026

For a quarter of a century, Helmdon has had its own place on the internet. The website began in 1999 as an idea at a church meeting. It went on to win national awards, served for eighteen years as the village’s notice-board, and then became the home of the village’s history. The website is now part of the history it records. This article tells its story, and the time capsule below lets you click through a few of the old pages and see how it looked.

An idea at a church meeting (1999)

The Helmdon branch of the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) had been running classes in the village since 1959. Through its Local Studies Group it had built up a strong tradition of local history, including the Aspects of Helmdon booklets and the memorial inscriptions project of 1997–98. In 1999 the branch noted that it “also plans to put some local history on to the Internet”.

The idea took shape at a meeting of the Friends of St Mary Magdalene in 1999. Audrey Forgham (then Audrey Harwood), the WEA secretary, discussed it with Terry Glassett, chairman of the Parish Council, and Renhart Gittens, a parish councillor. Audrey later recalled:

Realising the internet was going to revolutionise the way everyone recorded information I thought the WEA should record Helmdon’s history in the form of a website. I saw an AWARDS FOR ALL project being advertised by Northamptonshire County Council … and I applied for £75 “to start a website” (how naïve I was then, thinking somehow I could do it myself!).

Parish councillor David Brookhouse supported the application, and Terry Glassett suggested that it should become a website for the whole village. The small lottery grant paid for a digital camera, a scanner and software. Renhart set up the first internet account and published the first pages of the village history trail, which Audrey wrote with help from Jean Spendlove.

In May 2000 Danny Moody of the WEA Local Studies Group joined as webmaster. As Audrey tells it, Danny was new to the village and asked Sue Lidgley in the churchyard whether Helmdon had a website. She sent him to Audrey’s door, “and the rest is history”. Danny looked after the technical side and Audrey edited the content, especially the history. It was a partnership that would last for more than twenty-five years.

Going live (2000–2002)

After “copious amounts of midnight oil”, the site went online in the autumn of 2000 at www.helmdon.f2s.com and was officially launched that November. A leaflet went through every door in the village, and the local papers covered the launch. The Brackley Post quoted Danny: “The website is for the community written by members of the community. We rely totally on contributions.” The site had two aims: to share the history of the village, and to publicise everything that was going on in it.

It soon outgrew its first home. In January 2002 the Banbury Guardian reported that the site “has had to relocate after being swamped with hits”. The WEA had featured it nationally as an example of an excellent community resource. From then on it was www.helmdon.com.

The award years (2002–2013)

Helmdon was early among village websites, and other people noticed:

• March 2002: UK Villages Online Web Site of the Month. The judges called it “a lovely clear and clean site”.
• April 2002: the Amdow Web Design Community Website Award, with the top rating of five signposts. The panel said it was “a good example to follow”.
• April 2002: fourth place in the “Top 10 Community Web Sites” on Simon Mayo’s programme on BBC Radio Five Live.
• 2003: UK Villages Online Village Web Site of the Year, with twice as many votes as the runner-up.
• 2005: Calor Village of the Year, winner of the Information and Communications Technology award for Central England. The judges called the site “a demonstration of the way a community website should be built”. Danny and Audrey went to London to receive the trophy and a £500 prize from Alan Titchmarsh.
• 2013: the most informative website in Northamptonshire, in a competition run by Northamptonshire ACRE.

You can read more on the site’s own “virtual trophy cabinet”, the helmdon.com web site awards page.

A village notice-board

As the awards page put it at the time, “there are village web sites that have better design, or are more clever technically, but the Helmdon web site wins through on content and community spirit.” On one side was the history: the village trail, articles, reminiscences, obituaries, old photographs, documents and help with family history, which brought emails from people all over the world. On the other side was everyday village life: news, the village diary, the Parish Council’s agendas and minutes, the message board, classified adverts and a trades directory.

A small committee looked after the site (Danny, Audrey and Kate Moody in the early years). Danny built the pages in Dreamweaver and Audrey updated them with Adobe Contribute. In Audrey’s words, it “hardly went a day without it being updated in one way or other”. The look changed several times along the way, from the yellow-tab contents of the early years, through a pop-out menu, to the purple buttons of 2011. You can try all of these in the time capsule below.

Facebook and a fork in the road (2016–2018)

By the mid-2010s much of the day-to-day chat had moved to Facebook groups. Feedback from the Northamptonshire ACRE Village of the Year competition in 2016 was blunt: “I would recommend a re-design to bring the site up to date.” In 2017 the team worked with the University of Northampton on ideas for the future.

The answer, in 2018, was to split the site in two. The Parish Council moved to its own website, which would carry the village news and council business. On 10 September 2018 Danny posted the last item on helmdon.com, a photograph of the sun setting over the viaduct:

And so, with a mixture of pride and sadness, this is the last ever post on www.helmdon.com. … Thank you to all the web site followers. It’s been great fun!

helmdonhistory.com (2018–2026)

The history went on. www.helmdonhistory.com was registered on 6 September 2018 and went live on 20 September. It kept the familiar design but concentrated on history, including new research.

The old way of running the site was becoming hard to keep up, though. Adobe Contribute had become almost unusable, the old features were creaky, and the whole site depended on one person, who also paid for it. On 10 October 2023 the Helmdon Local History Group was formally constituted. Its founding members were Audrey Forgham, Ross Vicars, Cec Harrold, Faye Holloway, Mike Barnes, Hugh Walmsley and Danny Moody. With a group behind it, the website could be rebuilt for the long term.

A new site for a new era (2026)

The website you are reading now is the result. Thousands of old pages, documents and photographs have been moved into a modern system. It can be searched in new ways, it is easier to look after, and more than one person can edit it. Personal details that were fine on a village notice-board in 2005 have been taken out of the public record. We hope the content that made the old site special is all still here.

Time capsule: the old website

We have kept a small working copy of a few of the old pages so you can see how the website used to look. Choose a year, then click around. The menus work as they used to, but most links lead out of the capsule to the matching part of today’s site. To protect people’s privacy, the full news stories have been left out.

Find out more

• The Helmdon web site: the WEA’s own account of how the site began.
• helmdon.com web site awards.
• From Hillingdon to Helmdon – and the rest is history: Audrey Forgham’s reminiscences.
• Press cuttings: Villagers launch web site (Banbury Guardian, October 2000), Village gets its own web site (Brackley Post, October 2000), Village web site shows the way (Banbury Guardian, January 2002) and Award-winning website (WEA, 2002).