Everyday Histories Talk: 50 years of Voices [Heritage Open Day Festival]

Meet Lancaster University researchers who have been documenting everyday people's voices for over fifty years.

Interviews are a key resource on the everyday histories of people in the past, and for the Heritage Open Day Festival 2026, we are showcasing some of the collections held by our Special Collections and Archives which include interviews that can be used in social history research.

The event will feature talks by the researchers who created these collections, focusing on their research processes and showcasing over fifty years of research at Lancaster.

The first speaker will be Elizabeth Roberts who used oral histories to inform her research into the social history of Barrow-In-Furness, Lancaster and Preston from 1870 to 1970.

In three projects conducted between 1972 and 1989, Elizabeth documented the lives of over 260 individuals, drawing on what was then a relatively new technique in historical research.

Her research created one of the most important twentieth-century oral history archives in the UK, allowing us to hear the voices of people born in the late nineteenth century.

The physical outputs from these projects were transferred to the Library between 1975 and 1990; and redacted transcripts from the collection are available on the Regional Heritage Centre's website.

The second speaker is Annette Kuhn who since the 1990s has carried out research on cinemagoing and memory as part of the large-scale project Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain, which involved gathering evidence from several hundred British cinemagoers of the 1930s through interviews and questionnaires.

This project has become a reference point for other research and community work associated with cinema memory and histories of film reception. Its physical research materials and outputs were donated to the Library in 2006; and in 2017 funding was secured to digitise the entire collection and present much of it online as Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive.

The third speaker, Special Collections and Archives Manager Katie Waring, will present about The Jukebox: The Teenage Revolution (2023-2024), a collaborative project by Mirador Arts, a charity inspired by the hidden heritage of the North-West England, and the Lancaster University Library. The project focused on the boom in youth culture which followed the introduction of the jukebox to the UK in the 1950s and 1960s.

It involved a series of engagement activities including talks, events and commissioned art works informed by an oral history project managed by Lancaster University Library.

The outputs of the project, which have been brought together to form an archive collection held in our Special Collections and Archives, are available on the project website.

Event prices, age restrictions etc: The event is open for anyone to attend.

The Archive Research Centre is on the lower ground floor of the Library and has an internal entrance (https://link.mazemap.com/IkSDJHsj) and an accessible external entrance (https://link.mazemap.com/zEzPqfQY).

You can either book online at https://lancaster-uk.libcal.com/event/4576033 or contact the Library (01524 592516) to reserve a place on your behalf.