Documenting Housing and Labour Oral Histories with the Glasgow Housing Struggle Archive (GHSA)

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The Glasgow Housing Struggle Archive (GHSA), dedicated to documenting Glasgow’s housing and community movements, is launching an education programme from February to May 2025. Hosted at the Glasgow Zine Library and funded by the Deindustrialisation and the Politics of Our Time Trade Union Diffusion Award, the programme aims to create enduring community resources – including oral histories – to preserve the history of Glasgow’s housing struggles and its links with the trade union movement. Additionally, it aims to equip trade unionists and members of Scotland’s Living Rent tenant and community union with the skills and knowledge to document and preserve these histories.

Photo: GHSA Tools for Tenant Power launch event Glasgow Women’s Library July 2024 – Chris Moses

Workshops and Events

From February to May 2025, the Glasgow Housing Struggle Archive (GHSA) is hosting a series of workshops aimed at documenting and preserving the city’s housing and community movements, funded by a Deindustrialisation and the Politics of Our Times (DeOT) Trade Union Diffusion Award. The education programme aims to create enduring community resources – including oral histories – to preserve the history of Glasgow’s housing struggles and their intersections with the trade union movement.

It also hopes to build skills and knowledge among trade unionists and members of Living Rent (Scotland’s tenant and community union), supporting workers to document and record new stories and struggles in turn. Events will take place at the Glasgow Zine Library, a self-publishing library and community arts space. Attendees will then be invited to gather oral testimonies of housing, community and labour struggles, intended to be preserved in GHSA, as well as the Scottish Oral History Centre, with which GHSA are partnering.

In March, GHSA will host a scanning and digitisation workshop led by Paula Larkin, Archivist with Spirit of Revolt Archive, with a focus on digitising campaign leaflets, photos and pamphlets. In April, attendees will learn about cataloguing an archival collection with archivists from the Glasgow Zine Library. The programme will culminate in a session during the Glasgow Trades Council’s public May Day programme.

Photo: Keira McLean and Joey Simons, Glasgow Housing Struggle Timeline (2021) Part of Martha Rosler, If You Lived Here… (1989 – present) – Alan Dimmick

About the Organisers

The programme is organised and facilitated by members of GHSA’s collective: Joey Simons (Living Rent), Kirsteen Paton (University of Glasgow), Kirsten Lloyd (University of Edinburgh) and Oral History Collective member Kate Wilson (Newcastle University). It began in February with an oral history training workshop for trade and tenant union members, delivered by Kate.

About the GHSA

The Glasgow Housing Struggle Archive is an evolving project to document, share and learn from our city’s long history of housing movements. The past decade has seen the emergence of tenant and community unions like Living Rent that continue this radical tradition, and the GHSA also aims to record this ‘history in the making’ by working with union members and organisers.

We believe that social change happens most effectively when the working class gets to know – and tell – its own histories from below, and a core part of the GHSA’s project is to activate historical material through popular political education, discussions, workshops, walking tours, film screenings, exhibitions and publishing. We want to show how over 150 years of rent strikes, demonstrations, occupations and campaigning people have fought and won in the city, and can continue to shape it today.

Photo by Chris Moses

Oral Histories of Care: Caring Communities

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Children’s social care in the UK has long faced crises of abuse, increasing demand, and declining quality, prompting urgent calls for reform. Caring Communities: Rethinking Children’s Social Care, 1800–present is a seven-year project that seeks to transform our understanding of care by exploring its long history through oral histories, archival research, and creative methods. The project prioritises the voices of Care-Experienced individuals, families, and care workers to ensure more inclusive and meaningful research. Working with partners, the team aims to reshape historical perspectives on care to inform better policies and practices for the future.

The Need For Reform

Recent inquiries into children’s social care across the UK have called for a radically different mindset alongside significant investment to ‘reset’ the care system and ensure it effectively meets children’s needs. One of the key challenges is the enduring lack of attention to, and understanding of, the perspectives of children and families regarding welfare needs and experiences over time.

Meaningful transformations to current care systems cannot happen without an understanding of the complex contexts in which children’s care has developed over modern history. Understanding how children, past and present, have experienced care is essential for driving reform.

Photo: Matron and baby, The Children’s Society

Caring Communities: A New Approach to Social Care Research

The new seven-year project, Caring Communities: Rethinking Children’s Social Care, 1800-present, uses oral history alongside archival work and creative and participatory research methods to explore the long history of children’s social care in Britain. Spanning from 1800 to the present day, the project critically explores the nature, function, and value of care – while envisaging what it could become.

Across the first four years, we’re aiming to record the memories of people with knowledge and experience of the care system. While oral history is sometimes framed as a radical and inclusionary research method, particularly when dealing with histories of marginalised or stigmatised groups, the interviews can be fraught with questions of authorship and power.

The current focus of the project is developing the right policies and practices to embed collaboration and shared authorship from the outset and throughout. In this way, the team will ensure that Care-Experienced individuals are offered both a platform and the support needed to make a meaningful and significant contribution to research about the history of care and Care Experience.

Following the development of these policies, we will embark on our first phase of oral history interviews, which will focus on interviewing Care-Experienced people, their relatives, and care workers. This research, which prioritises the memories and perspectives of those with direct care experience, will deepen our understanding of care over time. A second, later phase of the project will explore how we can best enable children and young people to articulate their views and experiences about their care background.

Broadening Research Methods

While oral history interviews will help us capture certain perspectives and voices, we also recognise the need to broaden our range of methods to ensure that other individuals have the opportunity to share their experiences via different means and formats. The project will therefore develop a creative and participatory research programme, providing alternative ways for individuals to share their experiences of care.

Collaboration

We will also be working with our project partners (Barnardo’s, Coram, The Children’s Society, and Who Cares? Scotland) to explore how historical understandings about the world of care might best inform new ideas and understandings about care practices in the past, present and future.

Photo: Thirwell boys, The Children’s Society

The Research Team

The project team is led by UKRI Future Leaders Fellow Dr Claudia Soares. Claudia is a Modern British and Imperial Historian whose research interests include histories of care, family and childhood, the emotions, migration, and material culture, environment and landscape. Her first book A Home from Home? Children and Social Care in Victorian and Edwardian Britain was published with OUP 2023.

Joining her are:

  • Dr. Jim Hinks, whose work spans a range of interlinked themes, including histories of gender, class, families, crime, and deviance. Prior to joining Newcastle, Dr Hinks worked for the Scottish Government as a Response Officer to the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry. He has previously held teaching and research posts at the Universities of East Anglia, Edinburgh and Oxford.
  • Dr. Jade Shepherd, a historian specialising in the histories of medicine, crime and family. Before joining the project, Dr Shepherd was Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Lincoln (2016-2024).
  • Dr. Kate Wilson, who joined the project in October 2024. Kate will lead on the oral history strand of the project, and specialises in 20th century histories of care, class and culture. Prior to joining the team, she held posts at the Universities of Manchester, Glasgow and Stirling, and held an AHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Scottish Oral History Centre, University of Strathclyde, where she remains a Research Affiliate.

Preserving Byker’s Vibrant Past with Oral History

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The Byker Estate in Newcastle is internationally famed for its pioneering approach to urban regeneration through community participation and innovative architecture. Ralph Erskine significantly transformed the landscape of Byker and gained notoriety for his leading role, inspiring architects and historians alike. At the forefront of ensuring Byker’s human narrative remains as celebrated as its architectural accomplishments is the work of Silvie Fisch, an Associate Researcher at Newcastle University’s Oral History Collective and Director of Northern Cultural Projects.

Photo: Tyne and Wear Building Preservation Trust, Raby Way Photograph

The Unsung Heroes of the Byker Study Group

While Ralph Erskine has been credited as the instigator of the Byker Estate’s ‘bottom-up’ and participatory approach to redevelopment, Silvie draws attention to influential grassroot efforts that preceded its success. The largely unrecognised efforts of the Byker Study Group of the 1960s were crucial, as they lobbied for the rights of residents to remain in Byker and shaped the socially inclusive redevelopment.

Silvie and Dr Sally Watson, ESRC Postdoctural Fellow in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, have been invited by the Farrell Centre to co-produce the Fight for Byker and Other Stories (6 February – 1 June 2025) exhibition. This installation explores the lesser-known history of the Byker Estate, incorporating photographs, artefacts, and oral histories from contemporary witnesses. The focus is on the ‘pre-development’ period that laid the foundation for its success. Visitors are invited to contribute by bringing old photographs, negatives or slides that can be added to a memory wall.

The Fight for Byker and Other Stories is a free exhibition in The Sir Terry Farrell Building. More information can be found below:

The Fight for Byker and Other Stories

Byker Through Creative Lenses

Silvie also examines how Byker has been represented across different media over the past 50 years. At Byker in Focus (6 February 2025), she will join photographer Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, to deliver a talk on how artists, filmmakers, and architects have documented Byker’s distinctive urban culture.

Silvie poses critical questions about its representation: How do external portrayals compare to residents’ lived experiences? Can the “real” Byker ever be fully captured, or is it a dynamic narrative shaped by those who call it home?

Byker in Focus is a free talk in The Sir Terry Farrell Building. Booking and more information can be found below:

Byker in Focus
Photo: Tyne and Wear Building Preservation Trust, Shipley Rise and site clearance, 1970’s

Oral History and the Byker Estate

Silvie and Sally are working on plans for a “Byker Community Archive”, which will embrace past, present and future of the estate and create a lasting legacy for future generations.

The historical influences that led Ralph Erskine to envisage Byker, as well as its legacies have yet to be systematically documented, explored, and analysed. Numerous oral histories have been recorded over time but to this date can’t be centrally accessed. And as yet, several architects and other professionals involved in this pioneering scheme have not been interviewed, and many of the views of residents who have lived on the estate since its earliest days are still missing from the historical record.

The Srebrenica Memorial Center

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Last summer, Ed Garnett the new Communications Intern for the Collective spent a month at the Srebrenica Memorial Center Potocari. Here Ed, who is in Stage 3 of his History degree at Newcastle, writes about the Center’s oral history work and its significance to remembering genocide.

The Center

The Center was opened in 2000 to commemorate the genocide perpetrated in 1995 – the worst atrocity Europe has seen since the Second World War. Located where it happened, in the east Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica, the Memorial Center has a large exhibition space and a sprawling cemetery with over 8,000 grave sites. It serves as a place of remembrance, prayer, and education, ensuring the memory of genocide is neither forgotten nor denied.

Photo: Edward Garnett, Srebrenica Memorial Cemetery

Oral History

At the heart of the work of the Memorial Center is its oral history team, spearheaded by genocide survivor and author Hasan Hasanović. This team has worked to create an extensive archive of testimonies, preserving the stories of genocide for future generations.

Survivors are invited into the Memorial Center’s studio, where their testimonies are recorded using professional camera equipment and microphones. For those in remote areas, the team travels to ensure there is no story left unheard.

The Memorial Center is steadfast in its commitment to keeping those with a first-hand experience of genocide at the forefront of understanding. Their aim is to humanise the historical narrative and provide a depth to court rulings and statistics, which are often the focus in genocide research.

Each account in the archive is recorded, stored, transcribed, and translated, making it accessible for researchers internationally. While it is not yet publicly accessible, plans are underway to make it available in the coming years, creating a useful resource for understanding the genocide.

Photo: Edward Garnett, The Oral History Studio

Oral History Exhibitions

A collection of interviews forms a permanent exhibition inside of the Memorial Center: the poignant Lives Behind the Fields of Death project. This exhibition combines oral testimonies with artefacts donated by survivors and families. These items, including photographs and other personal belongings, are displayed alongside interactive screens where visitors can hear the stories behind them. Sometimes, the objects are the only surviving mementos of loved ones lost in the genocide, yet relatives and former friends willingly donate to aid the mission of the Memorial Center.

The combination of oral accounts and physical objects creates a visceral connection to the past. It underscores that the victims of genocide are not just numbers, but rather that they existed, they had their own lives, they had their own names, and they had their own belongings.

Tackling Current Issues

Bosnia remains a deeply divided nation, lacking a shared narrative of the war and the mechanisms for transitional justice. And while genocide denial and historical revisionism is happening at a local and state-level in Bosnia, the work of NGOs like the Srebrenica Memorial Center is critical.

The Center actively tackles distortions and silences through public engagement, aiming to ensure that accountability and truth remains at the forefront of public discourse. One of their key initiatives by staff are the annual Genocide Denial Reports. These reports use evidence-based monitoring to reveal the frequency and methods of genocide denial, while providing recommendations to address and counteract these harmful narratives.

Additionally, the Memorial Center seeks to influence future researchers in the field of transitional justice, social sciences, and human rights. This past summer, in 2024, I was part of a cohort of students from across the globe who congregated in the small village of Srebrenica for a week of informative lectures and field trips.

We left the programme enriched, gaining both knowledge applicable to our research and a network of like-minded peers. It reaffirmed the commitment of the Memorial Center to fostering international dialogue and awareness as well as addressing genocide denial.

The work of the Memorial Center is critically important – not only in preserving the memory of genocide but also in shaping the future of Bosnia and progressing transitional justice. I encourage everyone to explore their work, listen to testimonies from the Lives Behind the Fields of Death project, and read a section of the eye-opening Denial Reports. These initiatives provide an important foundation for establishing truth and combatting forces of denial.

Photo: Srebrenica Memorial Center, ‘First International Summer School’

Relevant Links

Srebrenica Memorial Center Website: https://srebrenicamemorial.org/en

Lives Behind the Fields of Death: https://zivotiizapoljasmrti.srebrenicamemorial.org/en

Brief Overview of West Balkan Genocide Denial: https://srebrenicamemorial.org/en/page/denial/29

The latest Genocide Denial Report (2023): https://srebrenicamemorial.org/bs/istrazivanja/srebrenica-genocide-denial-report-2023/18

Paying Our Way

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Since 2018, the Newcastle University Oral History Collective (NUOHC) has coordinated two projects addressing key contemporary and historical social justice issues around poverty and food insecurity: Foodbank Histories and the Mutual Aid Oral History Project. In this post Silvie Fisch and Jack Hepworth extend shared authority into interpretation on more equitable terms with community researchers.

Picture of "rubbish" - a doll, a clothes peg and a jigsaw.
Photo: Silvie Fisch, What remains?

Oral history interviews recorded for these projects have stimulated engagement, outreach, and creative re-use activities. Most recently, Live Theatre’s youth group drew upon interview testimonies to create “Fed Up”, a production investigating how food poverty affects young people across the North East.

In May 2024 the Live Theatre team brought their production to an appreciative audience at Newcastle Cathedral. When the final curtain was drawn, we rattled our donation buckets in aid of the Newcastle Foodbank. That same evening, it came to our attention that one of our interviewees – a single mother of two young children, whose interview recording was used in the production – did not have enough money to top up her electricity meter.

Here we are, smug with pride about doing good, helping to improve the reputations of institutions and companies, and furthering our own careers. Even worse, often we help to reinforce the prevailing conditions, instead of trying to drive fundamental change.

Last year, The Social Change Agency invited OHUC member organisation Northern Cultural Projects – a Community Interest Company – to become part of the learning community, to produce a handbook designed to embed mutually beneficial payment for involvement policies.

This involvement, combined with our doubts concerning current research involvement practices, underpins our new project Paying Our Way: Research Participation and Fair Pay. The project has received vital support from Newcastle University’s Social Justice Fund and Engagement and Place Fund.

Paying Our Way aims to extend the benefits for community researchers and research participants with first-hand experience of the issues we seek to address. We are exploring how best to involve research participants in project design, delivery, and decision-making. The project further considers how to remunerate participants for their involvement, without compromising any welfare entitlement.

Mutual Aid service users in the east end of Newcastle will choose materials for a new HCA website to reinterpret and showcase the previous projects. Their curation will ensure these projects’ continual relevance and accessibility to people with experience of economic disadvantage. With the help of our community researchers, we have organised an engagement event for the local community, that has evaluated the website’s content for relevance and to stimulate discussions around our previous research findings. The event included peer-to-peer translation and interpretation by and for members of different ethnic communities.

For the project’s next phase, we want to produce recommendations for the fair remuneration of research participants with direct experience of economic and social disadvantage. Our aim here is not simply to involve marginalised individuals. Rather, we hope to find better ways to support our community researchers and research participants in sharing authority beyond the collection of oral histories, and to design mutually beneficial methods for collaborative social and historical justice research.

Remember 1926

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Joe Redmayne, a Collective researcher associate, introduces our new “Remember 1926” project and its launch. The project is a collaboration between Newcastle University’s Oral History Collective (OHC) and Labour & Society Research Group (LSRG).

(Photograph of Dr Joe Redmayne at the Durham Miners’ Gala promoting the Remember 1926 project. OHC colleagues

Joe Redmayne at the Durham Miners’ Gala promoting the Remember 1926 project.

The project explores ways in which the centenary of the British General Strike of 1926 ought to be commemorated in two years’ time and seeks to understand the legacy of the strike in the lived experience of members of today’s trade unions and the wider labour movement.

The project launched at the 138th Durham Miners’ Gala on Saturday 13 July 2024, with a stall and leaflets to promote the project among attendees. We would encourage people to get in touch with their photographs, family stories, and memorabilia to help shed light on the General Strike.

Remember 1926 will revisit the General Strike, reassess the action and its place in our collective memory, as well as appreciate the aspirations of those who participated. To that extent, the group is attempting to commemorate and catch the last voices and their echoes over time from 1926.

(Photograph of Joe with the former leader of the Labour Party and now Independent MP for Islington North, Jeremy Corbyn, holding the Remember 1926 leaflets.)

Joe with the former leader of the Labour Party and now Independent MP for Islington North, Jeremy Corbyn, holding the Remember 1926 leaflets (see below).

Get involved

In the future, Remember 1926 will foster dialogue and prompt collaboration between trade unionists, political activists, academic researchers, community partners, heritage groups, archives, and museums. If you would like to keep updated or get more involved with the project, please complete the following questionnaire via the link (Get involved).

You can visit our webpage and social media below:

https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/commemoratingthecentenaryofthegeneralstrike1926

@1926Remember If you have any immediate questions about the project, please get in touch with Joe Redmayne via email at j.redmayne2@newcastle.ac.uk

Royal Holloway MA Public History student, Rachel Lawrence, interviewing Joe about the Remember 1926 project and his thoughts about the Durham Miners’ Gala.

Royal Holloway MA Public History student, Rachel Lawrence, interviewing Joe about the Remember 1926 project and his thoughts about the Durham Miners’ Gala.

Share your family stories, photographs, and memorabilia

If you have a story of an ancestor who participated in the General Strike, please let us know, as we would love to hear your family stories. You can contribute your own family stories via the following link Remember 1926 Questionnaire to help us grasp the different experiences of those involved in the strike and comprehend how your story lives on today.

Please include your name and email address, so we may be able to contact you in the future. Some of the questions the project is interested in answering are listed below: ·

What are the legacies of the General Strike? ·

What difference to Britain did the strike make? · What caused it? Could it have been avoided?

Is it an event still discussed by different generations of workers today? · Are there any family/community histories passed down through generations that still live on in today’s collective memory? · Have these stories shaped the descendants view of the trade union movement? · Why do people still strike today? · How and why should the centenary of the strike be commemorated?

Live Theatre: Fed Up!

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The Oral History Unit and Collective’s Foodbank Histories and Mutual Aid Oral History projects address the social and historical justice issues of Food Poverty. The projects have reached completion, but the issues remain, and the interviews and findings continue to influence ongoing research, public awareness and engagement initiatives. Here Unit Associate Researcher, Silvie Fisch reviews Live Youth Theatre‘s new production of Fed Up.

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Joe Redmayne joins Newcastle University’s Oral History Unit and Collective for Historic England’s ‘Women in Shipbuilding’ project.

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Joe Redmayne has joined Newcastle University’s Oral History Unit and Collective (NUOHUC) as a researcher to assist Historic England’s ‘Women in Shipbuilding’ project. The project works in partnership with NUOHUC; Women’s Engineering Society (WES); Imperial War Museums (IWM); and in collaboration with Remembering the Past, North Tyneside Art Studio and North Tyneside Council. It is funded by the Lloyds Register Foundation. For press reports about the project see the following links: BBC; ITV; Northern Soul; and Cultured North East. Joe writes:

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INSIGHTS Public Lecture: First Responder Memories of the 1988 Lockerbie Disaster

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In this post, Andy Clark, who is a research associate in History, Classics and Archaeology at Newcastle, discusses his upcoming INSIGHTS Public Lecture based on research that he has led into the aftermath of the Lockerbie Disaster, 1988. The lecture will take place on Thursday December 7th, 2023, at 5:30pm 

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