Ventnor & District Local History Society Open Meeting The Trustees would like to thank everybody who attended the Ventnor & District Local History Society Open Meeting held on 29 May 2026. We also extend thanks to those who couldn’t be with us on the night, who none the less, took time to contact us with… read more »
The Society meeting on Friday 28 November 2025 will be the last meeting of this year, and Paul Kingswell will be presenting a slideshow: My 2025 Collecting Year: 99 Old Photographs. The meeting will be in the Yarborough Masonic Hall on Grove Road as usual, 7:30 – 9:00 pm, admission free for VDLHS members, £4 for… read more »
Our new publication, ‘Oh Day of Days!’ has been produced to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings in June 1944, and is available in the Heritage Centre (price £4.50), and from our online shop (price £6.50 including postage and packing). Along with a new exhibition, which will be available in the Heritage Centre… read more »
Buona Vista Road rubbish tip. By Michael Freeman. In December 1903 19 year old Wallace Lowe and his horse had an incredible escape when they fell down the cliff at the end of Buona Vista Road while tipping a load of rubbish into the sea. The article describes the history of the road, and the… read more »
This month’s meeting is on Friday 28th July. The speaker is Paul Kingswell, whose talk, An Isle of Wight Postcard Collection, covers the history of postcards as well as the hobby of postcard collecting, and will feature a selection of cards covering various aspects of Isle of Wight life from the early 1900s to the… read more »
The next meeting of Ventnor & District Local History Society will be on Friday 29 July, when the speaker will be author Stephan Roman. His talk, Ventnor and the Struggle Against Imperial Russia, tells the surprising story of how between 1855 and 1860 Ventnor became a favoured summer retreat for Russians looking for political and… read more »
During Ventnor Fringe, we will be repeating this very successful guided walk around Ventnor. The walk, Ventnor – Cradle of the Russian Revolution, is led by author Stephan Roman and is based on Ventnor’s fascinating 19th century connection with some of the Russian radicals of the 1860s: writers and poets who opposed Russian imperialism and… read more »
Our Society ‘Monthly Meetings’ are back at last! The first meeting for 2022 will be on 24 June, when Andy Butler and Alan Clark will be presenting a talk entitled A Naturalist’s Lockdown. The photograph here is one of Andy’s, taken on Bembridge Down in December 2021. Andy’s talks are always popular, and since we… read more »
It Used To Be Like This is a classic memoir of life in Niton Undercliff in the early 1900s, written by George Roland Haynes (1906-1984). In his words: Already the lifestyle of my childhood is beyond the grasp of the young people of today . . . so I have written all that I thought should be… read more »
Ventnor and District Local History Society 2022 Annual General Meeting The 2022 Annual General Meeting of the Society will be held on Monday 4 April 2022 from 7:30 to 9:00 pm in the Masonic Hall on Grove Road, Ventnor. The meeting will be followed by a short slide show about the history of the Cascade… read more »