About us

The Local History library is situated in Grimsby Library and can be accessed via the lending library. It provides a wealth of information for researchers into the history of the area and for those who have a general interest in the past. As a recent visitor commented:
"The Local Studies Library is a fascinating place - I could spend hours in there!" Mr. B. Norfolk.

The opening hours are the same as for other Central Library departments. All items are for consultation only within the department and cannot be borrowed. It is possible to photocopy from most of them, subject to condition and copyright restrictions.

The geographical areas covered are the historic County of Lincolnshire from the Humber to the Wash prior to 1974, and the Counties or Humberside and Lincolnshire and their component districts 1974 - 1996. Since 1996 the collection has focused on the area covered by the North East Lincolnshire Unitary Authority with a limited coverage outside this area South of the Humber.

Additional local studies materials are available at the North East Lincolnshire Archives Office, situated at the rear of the Town Hall.

Streets and their Stories Heritage Project

Lincs Inspire’s Streets and Their Stories project has been made possible thanks to a grant of just under £40,000 from the National Lottery Heritage Fund. Using a mixture of photographs, documents and maps from the Local History Collection and materials from the Archives, we have invited people to share their stories, adding the colour of their memories to our black and white photographs.

The local history photograph collection consists of approximately 77,000 images of the area dating from the late Victorian to the present day, providing a fantastic visual record of the history and heritage of North East Lincolnshire. The Collection is arranged by place and by subject and the images of streets in a variety of localities form the heritage basis of the project, providing the infrastructure from which other areas of the photograph collection, and subsequently other local history resources can be explored.

Everything is connected to a street.... schools, houses, shops, people, places of worship and photographs act as a catalyst for evoking memories, conversations and shared experiences. Other local history resources such as our local historical newspapers, newspaper cuttings collections, maps and archive materials are used to support the conversations triggered by photographs.

By using the images in Reminiscence Roadshows, we have engaged with local people to discover the stories they have to tell about the streets on which they lived and worked, and these stories have then been recorded for posterity as a snapshot of history for future generations.

For further information about the project, and to listen to audio recordings of people’s stories and read the interview transcriptions, visit the Streets and Their Stories page on the Libraries website.