Supporting Lincolnshire’s libraries and local history month

We are delighted to be supporting the Lincolnshire Local History Festival. The Festival, organised by the county’s libraries, runs through May 2025. BGU is contributing an exhibition, ‘Gilbert Country’, which will be on view at Lincoln Central Library for the whole of May.

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The touring exhibition, designed by Andrew Jackson, Professor of Local, Regional, and Landscape History at BGU, has been produced with the generous support of Lincoln Central Library, Lincolnshire County Council, the National Trust at Tattershall Castle, North Kesteven District Council, Sleaford Town Council, and West Lindsey District Council.

Andrew opened the exhibition with a talk in support of the Festival, ‘Lincoln in 1914: a city in “Gilbert Country”, the impressions of a Lincolnshire author’, at Lincoln Central Library, on 10 May 2025.

The exhibition explores the fictional creation of the Lincolnshire author, Bernard Samuel Gilbert (1882-1927). Gilbert started to build his literary scheme around the year 1910. His untimely death brought the project to a sudden and sad end. He did not refer to it as the making of a ‘Gilbert Country’. However, it ranks today as an equivalent to ‘Hardy Country’ or ‘Brontë Country’.

Gilbert called his grand literary endeavour his ‘Old England’. It would derive much of its inspiration from his home county, but would also aim to represent a wider eastern England, especially fenland landscapes and places, as well as rural England as a whole.

The writings of Gilbert on Lincoln in 1914 have also been curated by Professor Jackson for Living Lincoln – A Virtual Literary Trail, produced for the City’s Festival of History. You can read more about Andrew’s research in his Rural England Through War and Peace: The Literary Work of Lincolnshire’s Bernard Samuel Gilbert, 1882-1927 (Lincoln: Society for Lincolnshire History & Archaeology, 2024).

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