Regular Meetings
We usually hold 10 meetings a year, including our Annual General Meeting which is always held in February. These meetings generally take place on the evening of the third Thursday of the month in February, March, April, May, June, July, September, October, November and December.
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All meetings take place in the Catholic Church Hall, Martin Street, SO32 1DN at 7.30pm and we look forward to seeing you there. If any changes to these arrangements are necessary, we will make this clear on the Home page and we will inform our members by email.
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The meetings usually take the form of a talk that lasts around 40-45 minutes. The talks themselves cover a range of subjects that are likely both to interest and inform our members (see current programme below).
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We are happy to welcome guests to our meetings, particularly anyone who may be interested in joining the Society. The subscription is just £10.00 a year for single members and £16.00 for joint membership. If you would like to join the Society please join via this page or contact either our Treasurer, at info@bishopswalthamsociety.org.uk - we will be delighted to welcome you!
20 February The Society’s Annual General Meeting. Our usual Annual General Meeting will be followed by cheese and wine and a short talk by Ali Naylor of English Heritage
20 March The Future of Bishops Waltham.
Ritchie Latham is one of three ward councillors for Bishops Waltham on Winchester City Council. He works in Finance, but has swapped the busy trading floors of London and Hong Kong for a more bucolic scene consulting from his home in Bishop's Waltham, where he lives with his wife and two daughters.
With Bishops Waltham having seen big changes in recent years, what is in store in the next ten, or twenty? More houses is a certainty, more nail bars a possibility. Who gets to decide what the future holds, and what can we as residents do to shape it?
24 April The Historic Houses of Bishops Waltham
Steve Forrest is a BWS Trustee, who relocated to BW from Birmingham in 2022, With the support of Tony Kippenberger, Penny Copeland and Grace Cox, the intention is to create an on-line record of the many and varied historic houses in Bishops Waltham and the people who worked and lived in them.
15 May Hidden in Plain Sight: Reminders of WW2 in the New Forest, Marc Heighway.
During the Second World War the New Forest area saw a huge amount of activity. It was home to several airfields, training areas, D-Day camps and an embarkation point, a secret spy school, a POW camp, traps were set for invading armies, and it was also the scene of the biggest ever bomb dropped on UK soil. This presentation takes the form of a photo tour and talk on areas of the New Forest you will be familiar with but showing you things left over from the war you might not have noticed before, and the stories behind them.
19 June Winchester; Boom to Bust, Donald Bryan
Don is a recently retired Professional Blue Badge Tour Guide for Central/Southern England, with a Degree in Archaeology. Don is also an Archaeological Dowser, and was National Chairman of the British Society of Dowsers Archaeology Group for many years.
His talk, Winchester; Boom to Bust, follows the years after the death of King John (1216) when Winchester was one of the most prosperous cities in England with a population second only to London. By the end of the 14th century the population had halved, the coffers were empty and 11 of its streets were de-populated.
17 July Titchfield Abbey, David Moore-Kelly
‘Behind the remains of a Tudor Palace the remains of the early 13th Century Titchfield Abbey. The talk explores the story its construction to assuage the guilt of battle and appease the nostrums of the Norman hierarchy and tells the story of the Premonstratensian Canons who inhabited prior to the Abbeys dissolution by Henry VIII.
August 2024 - No meeting
18 September Wolvesey Palace Winchester, Nicola Dyer, of English Heritage.
The Bishop’s Palace in Winchester and the Palace at Waltham are contemporaries – both started by William Giffard and added to by Henry of Blois. Wolvesey is a precious, albeit fragmentary, reminder of the Bishops of Winchester. Its future was the subject of an impassioned conservation battle that lasted over sixty years and encapsulated opposing ideas around how to care for ruins. Nicola Dyer of English Heritage will recount Wolvesey’s story.
16 October Austin and Wyatt project with Penny Copeland
In 2019 the Society and the Museum worked together to save all the documents held in the company’s former offices in St George’s Square. Penny, Collections Manager for Bishop's Waltham Museum and an experienced and popular speaker at BW Society, will give a taste of life in Hampshire since the 1830s, based on the more than 50 boxes of documents and 1,500 maps that were saved.
20 November, 'Who was Henry of Blois' with Tony Kippenberger
Henry of Blois, often known as Henry of Winchester, Abbot of Glastonbury Abbey and Winchester. He was the son of Stephen II, Count of Blois and Adela of Normandy, a younger brother of Stephen, King of England, and a grandson of William the Conqueror. Henry was also a major patron of the arts, funding the Winchester Bible and the font in Winchester Cathedral. He founded the Hospital of St Cross and built much of Wolvesey Castle. A fascinating figure who looms large in our heritage.
18 December 2025 - The Society’s Christmas Party
Our own Christmas Party – members and guests only. More detail to follow nearer the time...