Forum topic: Ten years of PGC!

The earliest PGC home page preserved by the British Library dates from August 2014. Click on the image to go to the complete page on the UK Web Archive.

It's ten years this month since the Palmers Green Community website was revealed to the world (actually, to a handful of people in PG). How did it come about? What did it look like and report? What was in the first newsletter? What events were happening locally back then?

How did Palmers Green Community start?

In late 2012 I was asked by Colin Younger, chair of the Broomfield House Trust, to look at reviving a website that he had set up in collaboration with Phillip Chard, the originator of the Palmers Green Festival. The aim of the website, called Palmers Green Community, was to "promote inclusive, locally rooted and accountable community organisations made up of people who care about the quality of life in Palmers Green and surrounding areas". Unfortunately, the main feature of the website, its discussion forum, was quickly overrun by spam and Colin had been forced to take it offline.

Since retiring in early 2011 I had worked on a couple of websites: first for an amdram group in Leytonstone, then for the Friends of Broomfield Park, and was interested in expanding my skills in this field, both as regards web technology and website content. I knew about the Bowes & Bounds Connected website that served the community south of the North Circular and Harringay Online website, both of which used a commercial platform called Ning. I was interested in replicating their main features - local news, discussions, an events diary and a directory of local groups - but I wanted to have more freedom to build the website the way I wanted and at a much lower cost. I knew about an open source web platform called Joomla and was intrigued to discover what could be done with it, and I was also keen to build online databases.

The revamped Palmers Green Community went live at the start of January 2013, incorporating two databases that I had designed: an events calendar and a directory of community organisations, plus an open source forum package called Kunena. Rather than waiting for people to submit events to the database, I went out looking for them, so that the website could hit the road running with a decent number of events listed. And I went looking for local news from various sources, which I rewrote adding context where useful. In May 2013 I started sending out a weekly newsletter (I "borrowed" the list of contacts from the Friends of Broomfield Park - this was before GDPR made doing that illegal), and that started the ball rolling, bringing in new readers slowly but surely.

To write this article I've delved into the archives. Sources are

• the British Library's UK Web Archive. The BL has sampled PGC occasionally from August 2014 right up to the present day. You can directly access issues where the url starts www.palmersgreencommunity.org.uk, but if you want to revisit the website since the url changed to www.pgweb.uk you'll have to visit the British Library in person.
• The Wayback Machine has some earlier dates, but missing stylesheet information, so looking rather odd.
• Email archives. I have a personal email archive dating back to 2001 (I use the excellent free Mailstore Windows application) that contains most of the email newsletters, including the first ever, dating from May 2013.
• The website itself. Almost all news items and forum posts are still on the website, though presented using the current format. You can use the search page or you can browse for articles by category or by subject tag. However, events listings are deleted after about a year, to stop the database getting too large.