Lily is the 2025-‘26 Oral History Collective Communications Intern – she manages the Collective social media, as well as contributing to The Lug and website.
Originally from Cumbria, Lily completed her BA in History & Politics at Oxford University, followed by an MA in Health Humanities at University College London. Her undergraduate dissertation was an oral history of networks of health, transport, and local identity in 1960s and ‘70s Cumbria. Her MA thesis explored portrayals of green space as a health resource in high-tourism areas of the UK during the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly in the Lake District. This work explored portrayals of Cumbria, Cornwall, and North Wales as national resources for wellbeing despite having disproportionate experiences of Covid-19 related movement restrictions, and holiday-related case patterns. It interrogated local press as a site where policing and contestation of local identity, and questions of who has the right to use these landscapes, played out.
After a couple of years working in museums and galleries in London, Lily moved back up North to begin her PhD at Newcastle in 2024. Lily’s PhD project is an oral history of volunteering in healthcare in the ‘far North’ of England, 1979-1997. Coined by Dave Russell in 2005, the term ‘far North’ refers to the (now ceremonial) counties of Cumbria, Northumberland, and County Durham, which he grouped together on the basis of shared ‘felt distance’ from political and cultural power in Westminster. The project explores everyday experiences of the NHS in small community and cottage hospitals in a region with long travel times to specialist services. Through oral history interviews, the meanings and experiences of volunteering, alongside rural healthcare needs and regional identity, are explored. The project sites these topics within broader historical processes of the past 50 years, including deindustrialisation and the marketisation of public services. It hopes to contribute to understandings of the North-south divide and current British electoral trends as well as adding to the growing social histories of the NHS.
The project focuses on hospital Leagues of Friends and hospital radio stations, but Lily is interested in interviewing people who volunteered in any healthcare task during this time. If you, or someone you know, might be interested in taking part, get in touch at L.tidman2@newcastle.ac.uk!
Outside the PhD, Lily is Senior Editor for the Newcastle School of History, Classics, and Archaeology postgraduate journal Pons Aelius, and host a weekly alternative music show on Newcastle Student Radio. In her free time, she likes wild swimming, skating, and playing the flute.
Russell, Dave. Looking North: Northern England and the National Imagination. Manchester University Press, 2004.
