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The Glamorgan Record Office
Patricia Moore
Glamorgan Record Office, Cardiff
© LIBER and author
Published from: LIBER Bulletin 22(1982)
The Glamorgan Record Office has many maps in its custody, but is not exclusively a map repository - it is a County Record Office, holding a variety of administrative and private deposited collections. As an integral part of many of these collections the Office receives maps, plans and architectural drawings.
Organsation
Archive-keeping at local government level in England and Wales is (with few exceptions) the responsibility of each County Council. Funding comes from the county rates, not from central government.
The Glamorgan Record Office was set up by Glamorgan County Council in 1939, but did not become fully operational owing to the outbreak of the Second World War. Since its
re-opening in 1947 the Office has grown, and its holdings are continually increasing as it attracts more material into its care. It serves an area of 225,150 ha, a population of 1.25 million and a growing number of researchers, as ever widening sections of the community make use of the volumes, papers, parchments, maps, plans, and photographs in Record Office custody.
In 1974 local government in England and Wales was reorganised. The old county of Glamorgan was divided into three new administrative counties - Mid Glamorgan, South Glamorgan and West Glamorgan. The three new authorities resolved not to fragment the collections of the Glamorgan Record Office but to support one Joint Archive Service; each County Council contributes one third of the yearly budget.
It was intended that this Joint Service would operate from two centres, one in Cardiff, based on the existing Glamorgan Record Office, and one in Swansea (60 km distant), based on a West Glamorgan Area Record Office in a West Glamorgan County Hall to be newly built. This County Hall opened in July 1982, and the Archive Service hopes to have an Area Office functioning by the end of 1983.
Accommodation
At Cardiff the docurnents occupy 27,000 linear feet (over 8,000 mn) of shelving, housed in strongrooms in the basement of County Hall, in three storage repositories on the outskirts of Cardiff and in one other repository 17 km outside Cardiff . Documents are brought from the out-of-town repositories to the searchroom in Cardiff when requested by researchers.
The office and searchroom accommodation in County Hall, Cardiff, which was adequate fifteen years ago, is now very cramped, both for staff and for the public. This situation unfortunately is not likely to change while the present local government financial cut-backs continue. The new West Glamorgan Area Record Office will have a larger searchroom , strongroom accommodation for the collections which are to be transferred, and space for future acruals.
User access
Any person, whether resident in the administrative area or not, may call, telephone or write in order to consult documents for personal, academic or legal purposes. Access is mostly free, but in certain cases charges may be made.
The collections
The collections held by the Glamorgan Archive Service arise from:
- Local government administrations in the area, at different levels -county , borough, district and parish
- Deposited collections - records from land-owning families, solicitors, religious bodies, commercial and industrial firms, professional and learned societies, and individuals
Some of the documents held are officially designated 'public records' and are held by the authority of the Lord Chancellor, who has formally approved the repository .The Record Office is also a recognized repository for manorial records.
Retrieval
Collections (including maps) are scheduled in detailed hand lists which are available on open access shelves in the searchroom. Maps will be listed amongst these collections, and they
will also be calendared, with detailed calendar entries in sheaf catalogues.
A card index under place name, personal name, and subject refers to the typed schedules and calendars, but the card index does not, as yet, extend to all the schedules.
Display of documents
The Record Office has no permanent exhibition area except two showcases in each of the three County Halls, in which a display of documents is changed every two months.
For the visit of the Conference a display of maps was laid out on the tables of a Committee Room - a procedure which is adopted when visits from local history societies and other interested groups are received. In this display representative examples illustrated the types of maps and plans which have come into the Record Office from administrative bodies and from private depositors.
From collections of administrative records
- Quarter Sessions (approximately 1,000 volumes of plans, and a duplicate series officially sealed for legal purposes)
The Court of Quarter Sessions administered Glamorgan from the creation of the county by Henry VIII under the Act of Union of England and Wales in 1536, until l888.
Amongst the Quarter Sessions records the main series of maps is that of Deposited Plans, dating from 1792. These plans were officially deposited (in duplicate) with the Clerk of the Peace (the Clerk to the Court) when a Bill relating to a harbour, dock, canal, tram road, railway, gas, or electricity undertaking or other public utility was placed before Parliament.
Among the Quarter Sessions Deposited Plans are those recording the Parliamentary Enclosures of common land. There were thirteen such enclosures in Glamorgan between 1809 and 1936. Plans in the Deposited Plans series were originally rolled. The Record Office has had the unsealed series flattened, repaired, mounted and cased.
- County Council (approx. 10,000 plans and architectural drawings)
In 1888 a Local Government Act brought County Councils into being to replace the Court of Quarter Sessions, which lost its administrative functions, but retained its judicial powers.
The Record Office holds plans and architectural drawings which arise from the varied areas of County Council activity, particularly those of road and bridge improvements, and of school buildings.
- Town maps (approx. 50)
In addition to printed town maps, mostly of the nineteenth century , the Record Office holds four unique series of large-scale town maps, prepared by the Ordnance Survey in 1850 and 1851, but never published. Maps of Cardiff were made on a 24-inch scale and the larger 1 :528, and for Merthyr Tydfil on a 25-inch scale and the larger 1:500. These maps are in ink and watercolour.
- Parish tithe maps (over 100)
Following the Tithe Act of 1838 the payment of tithes (tenths) to the Established Church was commuted from payments in kind to payments in money.
To facilitate the making of assessments each parish in England and Wales was surveyed (except in rare instances where the whole parish was in single ownership). The resulting maps were made in three copies, which today, for Welsh parishes, are at the Public Record Office, London, among the Diocesan records at the National Library of Wales, and at the Welsh County Record Offices.
The tithe maps furnished the first large-scale plans of rural areas. Surveyors in private practice undertook the preparation of these maps and there was no uniformity of scale adopted from parish to parish.
The Record Office copies of tithe maps have come into its care from over one hundred individual Parish Councils. Where the original parish copy has not survived the Record Office has obtained a photocopy from London or Aberystwyth so that the information shall be available locally.
From privately deposited collections
- Estate maps (30 volumes of plans and approx. 1,000 loose plans)
The records of landowning families form a major part of the deposited collections of every County Record Office. These collections are made up of title deeds, estate rentals and accounts, manorial court rolls, correspondence, photographs, maps and plans.
Estate collections document the emergence of aristocratic or gentry families in the more settled conditions of the sixteenth century , and record their participation in local affairs. By the eighteenth century the concentration of land in fewer, greater hands, is evident.
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century records reveal the development of industry in South Wales bringing new sources of wealth from the mineral and coal-producing parts of the county. The twentieth century, however, has seen the decline of many landed estates and the sale of property, often to the sitting tenants.
Few estate plans of the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century are known in Glamorgan. An important series comes from Fonmon, where the Welsh possessions of the St Johns family were mapped by Evans Mouse, who also surveyed the St John's English estates in Bedfordshire. The Evans Mouse parchment maps of 1622, showing the manors of Penmark, Barry, Llancadle and Fonmon, were set out on display when the Conference visited Fonmon Castle.
The improvement in techniques in surveying and mapping in the eighteenth century gave rise to fine volumes of estate surveys and individual maps. The Glamorgan Record Office holds surveys from over twenty major landed estates.
- Maps of communications and industry (approx. 3,500)
The industrialisation of Glamorgan began with copper smelting in the eighteenth century , and iron working soon followed. In the nineteenth century, however, mining and exporting coal became the dominant industries. These activities are represented by a wide range of maps and plans in the Record Office.
- Ordnance Survey maps (approx. 3,500)
The Record Office holds several series of Ordnance Survey plans covering the whole of its area on the 6-inch and 25-inch scales. These were first published for Glamorgan in the 1870s, and revised in 1899-1900 and subsequently.
The Record Office has slowly accumulated complete series of the earlier editions, and is also adding to the later editions. Many sheets have come from the Highways and Planning Departments of the County Councils, which pass on old editions when they acquire new revisions. Other sheets have come from local authorities at district level, from estate collections and from solicitors' offices. Unfortunately the Office has no funds for purchasing current editions and so cannot offer present-day maps for consultation.
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