Events

While some of our events are reserved for members only, others are available to all. You can find out what’s on offer from talks to guided walks and tours via our Eventbrite page here. Many of our events are offered free of charge and some are offered both as ‘in person’ and live-stream events.

Here’s our speaker list so far for 2025:

Katie Town: Theatre Royal Wakefield – history, heritage and future. Thursday, 16th January, 7:30pm, Wakefield Town Hall. This is our annual joint meeting with Wakefield Historical Society and this year, it is the Civic Society’s turn to host. Booking details available shortly.

Martin Wills, Historic Towns Trust: Mapping Bradford’s History. Thursday, 20th February, 7:30pm, Wakefield Town Hall.

Ever wonder how historic maps are created? Well, come to this talk to find out more!

The Historic Towns Trust (HTT) have been mapping towns and cities throughout England, Scotland and Wales since 1963. The evening will chart the origins of the organisation and the process of creating historical maps, which show the layered histories of our urban environments. HTT have now published seven atlases (comprehensive studies) and twenty OS-style maps, showing the history of our towns and cities – from pre-Roman times to WW2 – in one beautifully designed map resource. The maps show existing and now-vanished heritage sites, significant architectural structures, archaeological finds and now-invisible geographical features, to piece together the narratives of our local history.

Martin is the Development Manager at the Historic Towns Trust and will be explaining the work of the HTT and looking at their most recent project to map Bradford’s heritage.

A free talk, open to all. Book here.

Tegwen Roberts: Our Heritage, Our Stories: A Heritage Framework for Wakefield District Thursday, 20th March, 7:30pm, Wakefield Town Hall.

Tegwen is the Heritage Development Manager at Wakefield Council, tasked with implementing the Council’s Heritage Framework which was adopted by the Council in 2024. Wakefield Civic Society has supported the creation of the Framework and is now working with Tegwen and other heritage partners to help to deliver the Council’s heritage strategy detailed in the Framework.

A free talk, open to all. Book here.

We’ll be adding more events to this list in due course.

Catch up on talks you may have missed!

With the advent of lockdown in March 2020, the Society moved many of its events on-line. Most of the webinars we have organised since March 2020 have been recorded and are available to watch on our Vimeo page. To see these and some other short films that we and our partners have produced, visit our Vimeo page here: Wakefield Civic Society (vimeo.com)

(Some of our talks have been recorded but are only available to view by members of the Society and members are sent details of how to access these recordings. If you are a member and have lost the details of how to access the recordings, please get in touch.)