The Bishop's Stortford Museum is located in Cecil Rhodes’ birthplace. The museum is part of the Rhodes Arts Complex, which incorporates the Rhodes Theatre, Cinema, Dance Studios and Conferencing.

This project focused on an extremely rare collection of local police records, dated between 1841 and 1919. The collection includes constables’ journals, incident logs, and charge sheets from 1914 - 1918, showing the everyday detail of how Bishop’s Stortford was policed during the First World War.

Volunteers were recruited and trained by the museum to explore and digitise this rare collection, which had been recently conserved as part of a separate project. They researched the possible stories to be told, carried out oral history interviews with former policemen and digitised the documents. An exhibition in the museum and other local venues showcased the results of the research, and university students presented selected themes as graphic stories. A theatre group worked with primary school children to develop and produce a community play, and a smartphone app re-created an ‘on the beat’ walk with a policeman from the First World War.