A special one-day conference at the Essex Record Office investigating Essex's industrial past: Sat 6 July 2013, 9.30am-4.30pm

Since large-scale industrialisation began in the eighteenth century, industrial development has had a huge influence on the way people have lived. Essex is often overlooked as an industrial county, but industry is a fascinating aspect of the county's past. This one-day conference will take a look at the industries which sprang up here, and the impact they had on local people's lives.

Read more: Essex's Industrial Archaeology

The website is currently undergoing some essential maintenance.

Progress update: the main infrastructure work on the server is now complete, and the website should once again be fully operational. We are now accepting member registrations again.

Some less major work still needs to take place, and so the site may continue to be unavailable for short periods over the next few days. We apologise in advance for any inconvenience that this may cause.

This work is required to bring you improved security when accessing the members' area of the website. If you have any questions, please contact us.

Thank you for your patience.

Annual Engineering and Technology Competition: 28th June 2013

This year we are once again pleased to invite you to enter our annual Engineering and Technology Competition which will be held in Chelmsford at the Rivermead Campus, Anglia Ruskin University, Bishop Hall Lane, CM1 1SQ on Friday 28th June 2013.

The competition aims to encourage young people to take up a career in Engineering or Technology, and offers an opportunity to meet like-minded people in what we believe is a stimulating and fun environment.

There will be more than 25 prizes to compete for, donated by the Society and local businesses.

Read more: Schools' Competition 2013: Call for entries and SEEDS

Starting from discussions between a group of former Marconi Radar colleagues, over the past two years a set of online archives has been created covering the histories of the major parts of the Marconi company. By gathering in memories, and in many cases collected paperwork and artefacts, we have built up a lot of the story, but there are still gaps. To fill these in we want to spread the net so this is an appeal to anyone who worked for any part of Marconi to get in contact with us and donate what they have.

There is a possibility that within the New Street redevelopment we can create a physical Marconi Heritage Centre as we are now working with the BAE Heritage Product Committee who already support similar establishments. This means we can have a Chelmsford-based archive.

Read more: Marconi Heritage Centre

My experiences at The Big Bang Fair - by Imogen, year 8 pupil at Felsted

My name is Imogen and I am 12 years old and last year, two of my school friends and I were lucky enough to have our project , relating to how effective hair straightening products are, chosen to be taken forward to represent the East Anglia region at the National Finals of the Big Bang Fair.  After learning this exciting news in July, we spent the next 8 months perfecting our project and taking our scientific tests even further to make sure that we were in the best position to compete with the other talented scientists from around Great Britain that would be making up this prestigious event.  We even arranged for a trip to a well-known cosmetics brand, to learn for ourselves what kind of tests big manufacturers did on their own products to ensure they were safe for the general public to use. 

Read more: National Big Bang 2013