Measham has long been an industrial village, in the 18th & 19th centuries it was part of the great industrial revolution with Joseph Wilkes and the mills. In the 20th century the focus turned to coal mining as with the rest of the Ashby Woulds area. We all know what happened to the mining industry and while much industry has remained in Measham things have had to change…
Over the last 15 years Measham has had to find a new identity. No longer is the community employed in coal mining and the numbers employed by Red Bank (Hanson) have steadily declined. With millions of pounds of investment having been brought into the village over the last 10 years Measham has seen a rebirth.

Communities all over the UK have changed as a result of the decline in traditional manufacturing and skilled jobs. With the individualism expounded by the Thatcher government in the 80’s and carried through in subsequent governments we have seen a very isolationist tenancy amongst residents, very rarely engaging with even their own neighbour let alone someone on a different street. Local pubs are frequented less and less – not actually a result of the smoking ban but something started well before that as a change in culture.
We still have the families who worked in the traditional industries and who are/were the bedrock of the community. Everyone knew everyone else and life was hard, but good. Since Meashams’ rebirth we have seen the community expand to include new residents who have moved in as the commuter belt for Birmingham and London gets ever larger; also we have seen new arrivals from the European Union both from ‘Old Europe’ and also from the accession states of Poland, Latvia etc…

Technology too has played its part in the breakdown of communities. With the expansion of the ownership of TVs and a multitude of channels to watch on said TVs much of people’s time at home is spent watching the latest ‘reality’ TV show or ‘Talent’ contest. While I am not denying that TV has very significant benefits to society, it does mean that the worst of society – or even of individualism gets an airing while other more productive distractions get left behind. With all the cut-throat competition programmes with individuals being set against other individuals it is not difficult to see why sections of ‘society’ end up living with little respect for ‘everyone else’. In a way we cannot blame them for being that way – they of no other way to be.

I am conscious to bring the internet in at this point, I shall have to tread lightly here, as I am after all trying to promote the use of a website here… The internet kicked off in about 1996/97 from what I can remember, but then it was through a dial-up modem. If we had BBC iPlayer then we would have to leave a 30 minute programme downloading for about 2 hours, so the internet was good for email and basic Instant-Messaging (IM) applications there were basic websites, mostly serving the adult industry, but that was about it. SMS Text messaging came in around 1997 – I will come onto that when the internet is a bit older though.

Given the money involved and with demand for faster and faster internet with richer content being driven by consumers and content providers technology moved forward apace. We soon entered the realm of ‘flash websites’ and online video and audio content. However this was all still fairly static content that was uploaded by a content provider and viewed by a consumer, the internet at this point was seen as a good place to sell things, write news articles and generally make money. People used it but were not glued to their computers unless they played computer games.
Let’s fast forward to 2007. The internet by this point has really taken off, there are even more channels to watch on TV, but slowly the reaction to the growing tendency for individualism was starting. The internet had become social. No longer were the traditional provider/consumer relationships in play – this was Web 2.0! User driven content started with the ability to start your own website getting wider and wider – Yahoo!’s geocities software was particularly useful for this, then you got people using You Tube & My Space. This was a revolution where users of a site could share their own content, whatever the media you could upload it and share it with, quite literally, the world.

I remember the news stories, quite some time ago actually, of when Facebook overtook MySpace in the number of users. It now has over 400,000,000 registered users. Facebook is different, it is a social networking site where user are truly interactive, not only do they catch up with friends from a long time ago, but through either their friends or interests they can meet completely new friends. It has thrown open community and we now have the situation where community is no longer geographical. Communities are now split up into more defined groups, I won’t go into too much detail but the problem I see is as follows…

For those readers with some scientific knowledge picture, if you will, a group of people as a gene pool. Already not too difficult to imagine as that’s what we are… Imagine that instead of physical characteristics the genes in our imaginary group determine our personal likes, dislikes, talents and experiences. A normal ‘Gene pool’ is one where there is an abundance of variety; this abundance means that a group is less exposed to strange diseases. It is quite widely accepted that biologically for a species a wide gene pool is a good gene pool; this is also true in my opinion with communities. If we treat a village like a gene pool with genes expressing the characteristics above we can see that as long as we act like a ‘gene pool’ and share our traits with others then we should be just fine.
What happens when we get communities moving away from their previous geographical confines that communities get streamlined into those with similar interests and experiences etc.. the gene pool narrows and the eclectic variety and strong relationships in the old communities get lost somewhat. We also stop knowing how to be excited about the difference between people, while not a new phenomenon it has certainly gained speed as increasingly homogeneous online communities prevail over the varied geographical ones.

One Measham is intended to be mainly web-based as a tool to encourage people who have got online and involved in non-geographic communities and give them a familiar environment to get back to engaging with their geographic community online, I shall discuss how this translates to the offline world in a later section – for the time being I believe it is important for us as a village to have a place where we can engage each other and learn from each other.