A message from Hatters' Heritage honorary president Rob Stringer
It is my great pleasure to announce the launch of the revamped Hatters' Heritage website. As a fan for 50 years I am still learning about our club's illustrious history from the wonderfully nostalgic photos and information that the site provides.
These thousands of photos taken from the Luton News collection at Wardown Park Museum are a great addition as are the new sections such as five minute reads. I am sure it will be hugely popular and sets the standard for all other clubs.
We are very lucky to have a band of dedicated volunteers for such a wonderful achievement. Hatters' Heritage do not have advertisers or sponsors at the time of writing so there is an opportunity for businesses to take advantage of the enormous number of hits that the website enjoys and will continue to attract. In the meantime, I send my hearty congratulations and thanks to all the team at Hatters' Heritage.
A message from the Hatters' Heritage trustees
The new and improved Hatters' Heritage website has now been launched, and whilst we hope you all enjoy and are educated by the new version of the website, we want to give an overview of the many hours of this labour of love.
Although the site has been launched, this is not the end of the road, as preserving the history of Luton Town Football Club is a never ending honour, which we cherish and relish.
Spearheaded by Club historian Roger Wash, our volunteers spent thousands of hours searching through 1.5 million negatives belonging to the Luton News dating back to 1885, to find over 72,000 images of Hatters placed in the archives of the Wardown Park Museum and which will now be given new life on the website. Work is now ongoing in adding better quality match reports, digitised from the original copies of local newspapers also housed at Wardown.
In addition to this, you will see that features from over 1,400 programmes have been clipped, uploaded and assigned to players on the site, with another 10,000 images of match photos and reports captioned and assigned to preserve and enrich every memory of every possible game.
But most importantly, we have managed to put more faces to Hatters thought to be lost to the sands of time, with many more players receiving pictures to go with their names which have been etched in our rich, almost 140-year history.
We couldn't have done this without the support and resources kindly donated by our members and patrons, but as mentioned above, our work to preserve the history is by no means completed, in fact, it's just starting. Maintaining the website, continuing to upload new material and procuring items of importance to our history for our museum collections. While we operate with volunteers, we would be extremely grateful if you choose to become a patron to assist us in continuing to preserve our history.
Our special thanks go out to Hatters' Heritage Honorary President Rob Stringer who generously donated the funding needed to produce the new website as well as providing the above piece. We are also deeply indebted to Luton Town Supporters' Trust who have donated the amount needed to cover our hosting costs for the next 12 months.
We have worked hard with website hosts Silvertoad to remove any glitches on the site but we know there will be some. If you spot any, or have any other observations or ideas, please contact us via enquiries@hattersheritage.co.uk.
