Revisiting Robert Leggat's Bedford news archive

These days we are used to being able to find any bit of news about anything.. anywhere. But in the digital age you can only search back so far before you hit a wall. And with local media you tend to hit that wall quite quickly.

So I found myself trying to look up a bit of local information from the 1990s, something that is pretty difficult to do online. Well.. to be honest, I didn't find the information that I was looking for because I got side-tracked by Robert Leggat.

So who exactly is.. or should I say was Robert Leggat? Well, he died rather too early aged 70 in 2011 (his Guardian obituary is here) but during his life he was fascinated with technology, especially photography, computers and the fledgling web. I met him several times, and he was an interesting character who was definitely a bit of a pioneer.

Between 1997 and 2008 (when he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease) Robert maintained a a portion of his website initially called "Mainly for Expats" and then just "Weekly News" which was a summary of local Bedford news from the local newspapers and other sources.

So.. the thought came to me that this particular website might be handy in finding the information I was after. But of course, it has been long deleted and consigned to the great bit-bucket in the sky.

Or has it? Well.. no. There exists a thing called the Internet Archive Wayback Machine which has been trawling and recording the web since the late 1990s. It's incomplete and slow, but it can be a very useful research tool for finding out what might otherwise have been forgotten.

A bit of wrangling finds two pages that cover almost all the new stories covered in the site, this page from 2004 and this one from 2009. There are some interesting bits and pieces listed there that I suspect people had probably hoped had be forgotten. Unfortunately, you can't search the archive to find the topics, it's a rather manual process.. and the Internet Archive seems to have some trickery installed to prevent downloading.

Alternatively, you can just use the Wayback machine to flick through some local history here (up to May 2006) and here (up to April 2009).

Anyway.. here's to Robert and the pioneering work he did!