The philosophy underpinning the project is to involve the community in discovering, acknowledging and celebrating their heritage and to this end all the activities will be undertaken with community participation in mind through events such as workshops, memory/recollection sessions, public meetings etc.

The Woodville area is rich in heritage with a wide variety of industries such as potteries, crate making, pipe works, breweries, rope-making and railways all having had a presence in the area which is now either totally gone or extremely diminished. Currently, Woodville is a fast changing area with a lot of new housing development that is either replacing or altering the existing features and landscapes. The Parish Council and other partners wish to capture and celebrate Woodville's 200-year history.

Woodville was at one time - and not so many years ago - known as 'Wooden Box' and even 'Box' named after the wooden toll booth on the toll road from Ashby de la Zouch to Burton-upon-Trent. The toll booth was replaced by a brick building around the turn of the century, and that too has now gone. The area around the roundabout, which is the modern equivalent of the toll booth, is still known as 'Tollgate'. This is at the junction of five roads - the A511 Ashby de la Zouch to Burton-upon-Trent road (formerly known as the A50), the A514 Swadlincote to Derby road, and the road to Moira.

Woodville was one of many mining communities in the South Derbyshire coalfields, which developed during the second half of the nineteenth century. It lies astride the geological Boothorpe Fault, which prevented the mining of coal to the north of the village. The main local collieries, all outside of Woodville parish, produced around 700,000 tons of coal per annum at their height but were virtually exhausted by the end of the century.

This led to the development of small shallow pits initially extracting coal but subsequently, for economic and geological reasons and with the introduction of the 1866 Sanitary Act and the 1875 Public Health Acts, extracting fireclay and pot clays. These clays formed the basis of the intensive development of earthenware manufacture in Woodville and the surrounding areas.

The last of the main collieries ceased working in 1967 but the tradition of earthenware production still continues in the local manufacture of sanitary ware and also the nearby famous T.G. Green Cornish tableware. Almost all of the signs of the old industries - the coal and clay workings, the railway sidings which carried the coal to the main lines for distribution, the pottery kilns - have now disappeared.

In recent years, the whole of the South Derbyshire area has been the subject of regeneration. The main business of the village is now light industry, but the recent development of the National Forest is bringing other industries and tourism to the whole area.