Hi! I’m Lynne. While I’m not a member of the congregation at All Saints, you may have seen me in the church, or in the churchyard, attending events, taking photographs, or generally just milling around! Or, you may have seen me over at the Old Rectory, where, as a former committee member of the Loughborough Archaeological and historical Society who look after the museum, I have often helped out at events.

My interest in Loughborough is not limited to this beautiful and impressively large church, and I can often be found out and about in town, or, in fact, anywhere in Loughborough! As an accredited Leicestershire Tour Guide, specialising in Loughborough, I can also sometimes be found leading groups of interested folk on a guided tour of our lovely town. I also write a blog about Loughborough every Sunday, and have been doing this for nearly ten years now! And it is this that I wanted to share with you …

Over the years I have written several posts about the church, the Old Rectory, Fearon Hall and the surrounding buildings, and many of these also appear in one of my books about Loughborough. I have also written about that well-known Rector, 1848-1885, the Reverend Henry Fearon. More recently, however, I have posted about a perhaps less well-known Rector, the Reverend James Bickham, who was associated with the church from 1761 to 1785. One of the reasons for writing about him now is that he bequeathed his library to the Rectors who succeeded him, which was at one time held in the church itself, so as an early-retired professional librarian, I am very interested to find out more! The collection has moved around rather in the past 230-odd years, but is now held in a nearby university, where the staff in the Archives and Special Collections department are working on making the titles in the collection more visible on their library catalogue.

If you would like to learn a bit more about the Reverend James Bickham and his library here are the links to my blogposts.

My first post is about the man and his career

While the second post is concerned with the library Reverend Bickham bequeathed

I hope you will enjoy reading about this church-related history. Oh, and did I say, naturally, Reverend James Bickham lived in the Rectory, that we now know as the Old Rectory? No, I don’t think I did! I feel another blogpost coming on …