A good place to start is the library, checking out old books, maps, deeds. These can point out land ownership and shed light on how the locality was used. Talk with local groups and organise an archive day 'Down memory lane' where you can collect memories of older residents. Royston Community Project went through the records and here's their story....

When the Royston local history group began to dig deep into the town’s past, they realised theirs was a story of economic ‘boom and bust’. Using a mixture of oral histories gathered from older residents, researching family letters, deeds, maps, directories, school log books and surveys from the early 19th and 20th centuries, the group has put together a patchwork picture of life as it was back in the ‘old days’. Research showed that life for Royston’s residents was sometimes good, sometimes not so good. Early accounts paint a picture of a rural idyll: agricultural and trade crafts such as handloom weaving and malt-kilns were the main sources of income for the local community 200 years ago. But look beyond the surface, and the reality of living in the country presents a harsher face. Accidents and infant mortality were a grim fact of life, as census returns and parish magazines bear testament.

Royston was well-known for its orchards and it’s residents would turn out to help bring in the harvest from market gardens and home plots. Wagons of produce were sent to Leeds and Sheffield overnight for morning markets. Children would be absent from school, kept home to help with the important business of harvesting according to school records. The village went through something of an economic shift in the mid 19th century when the population doubled in size between 1831 and 1881, from 597 to 1128. The reason for such growth? The dawn of the railway age and the rich coal deposits that lay beneath the land.

When the Midland railway came to Royston in 1840, it had a great effect on village life. Cheap and speedy travel became accessible to villagers, whilst providing work for the men as platelayers, guards, signal-men and engine-drivers. Letters show that instead of taking nearly a day to get to Manchester, the journey could be completed in an hour from Royston’s station.

The canal played it’s part too in the industrial economic boom. Used to transport coals from the Barnsley coal fields to the Aire and Calder, the canal provided employment for construction gangs in the 1790s. Look around Royston today and you’ll see the canal still there, plus the Hope and Anchor and Bridge House which are present day reminders of Royston’s Canal Age.The second population explosion came between 1881 and 1911, when Royston’s community grew nearly six-fold from 1128 to 6231 according to census records. This was a turbulent time with incoming migrant workers, mainly miners and their families. Rich coal seams crept closer to Royston and by 1870 the new sinkings were clearly visible from the village which already had the nucleus of a colliery community.

Within 120 years of the birth of the railways, the lines to Royston had closed. The coal industry had died by the mid 1980’s and the canal is no longer used commercially. Yet Royston is not untypical of a town where fortunes have waxed and waned, experiencing periods of massive growth and inevitable shrinkage.

Although life is quieter in Royston, look closely and you’ll see the industrial heritage that helped a village grow into a town and make it the place we see today. The community’s past is preserved in the Royston archive, a collection of thousands of pictures, personal accounts and records painstakingly collected and preserved for generations to come.