About us

Bird's Eye Painting of Leigh by Anna Rowley (ca. 2001)
Bird’s Eye Painting of Leigh by Anna Rowley (ca. 2001)

The Leigh and District Historical Society was founded with two main objectives:

  1. To provide an annual programme of meetings with presentations on historical subjects connected to Leigh, together with presentations on subjects of both county and national interest. Full details of the current programme can be found under Events. Non-members are welcome to attend our talks at a small charge. Our outings are open to members only.
  2. To maintain and add to our archive of local historical material and to make this available both to local residents and historians in general. This website makes some of this material available on-line and we continue to add material where possible to the website. Some of our archive material is, however, only available from the archive itself. Further information can be obtained from our Committee Secretary/Archivist

The current officers of the Society are:

  • Chairman: Chris Rowley
  • Deputy Chairman: John Stevens
  • Treasurer: James Cook
  • Committee Secretary/Archives and Books/Website Editor: Joyce Field
  • Membership Secretary: Rachel Glenny
  • Programme Secretary: Mark Hammer
  • Events Secretary: Janet Court
  • Webmaster: Matthew Cock

The LHS will undertake limited research in its Archives and other available records where we have some limited information on individual names and places, primarily through information passed on to us by fellow researchers in the past or by our own researches.  Requests for research should be made initially through our contact form, giving as much detail as possible. Our Archivist will then contact you. We cannot guarantee we will find what you are looking for, and we cannot vouch for the accuracy of the information or the sources used.

Our website has some transcriptions of documents, such as the old churchyard, Leigh vestry minutes 1823-1844; we have indexes to Leigh baptisms, marriages and burials from 1813 and we have the Colyer Ferguson Index of BMDs pre-1813.    However, we do not hold the original registers which are either with Leigh Church or Kent Archives.