2007
The St Just & St Mawes Heritage Group was formed by Alan January and Dawn Andrews with the aim of providing a means of collecting and recording the history of the parish of St Just in Roseland.
2009
For three or four years we put on local exhibitions each autumn for a week as part of the Roseland Festival. These were very popular with many local people and visitors; they focussed on different aspects of village life and history, and you can see the photos from these exhibitions on this web site. We also provided talks and began organising projects to involve the children at St Mawes School.
2010
When Professor Phillip Dark, a resident of St Mawes died, he left the Parish a hige collection of his photographs. These were given to the Heritage Group for our collection. We had no premises and so we decided that the only way to make these more widely available was to create a website. Dawn set up our first website, digitalising Professor Dark's photos and soon contributions of pictures and memories started arriving from far and wide from this country and abroad. Later, a facebook page enaled more pictures, comments, identifications and conversations to be displayed. Another large collection of post cards and photos was given to us by local artist and photographer, Brenda Pye, and these were also added to our growing collection.
2013
The next big change came in 2013 when two red telephone boxes in St Mawes became redundant and the Parish Council was offered them for £1 each. The Heritage Group saw the potential for these to become permanent exhibition spaces and since that date, with the help of one of our members, we have put themed photographic exhibitions in the boxes each year. You can see the photos from these exhibitions here on the web site.
2014
By 2014, we had a constitution and had become a registered charity. We are a CIO (Charitable Incorporated Organisation) number 1158544. We also set up a membership so that our supporters could become more involved. See the membership section of the web site for details of how to join.
2017
Having become a charity we were now able to apply for grants and so we applied to the Heritage Lottery Fund for £10,000 to employ The Story lines Group to record memories of the main areas of the two villages. This was very successful and we filmed some of our older residents walking along the main areas of the villages talking about these places in their childhood. We finished up with 2 films which were sold widely in the Parish, and can be viewed on this website.
2019
Our monthly talks started in 2019. Each month we invite a guest speaker to talk about a local history topic. We felt this would involve our increasing number of members who could attend free as part of their membership. It was also open to local non members and also to many holiday makers for a small charge. You can see a list of speakers and their subjects on the talks part of the website.
