Frost's ledgers

 

The volumes contain many Buckinghamshire properties

Becky Field

The scope of the material found in the archives is extremely varied, ranging from maps and historic documents about Beaconsfield through to newspaper cuttings and personal memoirs, and including, of course, the artefacts and records illustrated in these articles.

One of the oldest Estate Agent’s in Beaconsfield, A. C. Frost (now The Frost Partnership), has very kindly donated some of its early records of property sales; these are large bound ledgers of agent’s particulars with notes about the subsequent sales price and the new owners. These provide a wealth of historical data from the past and are worthy of a more detailed research project – needless to say they’ve proved very popular with the volunteers, all of whom seem to be very interested to find out how much their own homes were sold for in the past.

Each Beaconsfield property has been individually logged into the archive catalogue and will eventually be searchable within the website records. Each volume of particulars has its own index which can be searched and the two volumes shown  contain over 500 sales records of Buckinghamshire properties, which include some in Beaconsfield, between them.

A future project which would provide interesting historical data for the town might involve plotting these sales on a map with a copy of the documents available.