Found in the Seams Where the Past and Present Meet

<p dir="ltr">The pieces in this book are inspired by the Nottingham Oral History Collection which is made up of over one hundred interviews with people from Nottingham who share their experiences of living and working in the city. The interviews in the collection were originally recorded on cassette tape in the 1980s and were digitised in recent years as part of the British Library’s Unlocking Our Sound Heritage project. They are looked after by Nottingham Central Library.</p><p dir="ltr">I encountered all aspects of life listening to the narrators in the collection. These were people born in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Victorians and Edwardians.</p><p dir="ltr">I took extracts from the recordings back to the places that inspired them by making a series of journeys through the city. I went to the Broad and Narrow Marshes, once slums and still slums in the memories of our narrators, replaced by a brutalist shopping centre in the 1970s and now undergoing redevelopment again. Along the waterways of the Leen and the canal where children learnt to swim to the wilder edges of the River Trent at Clifton Grove. Across the Meadows, an area home to my own family four generations ago and where people were blasted by a Zeppelin raid during the First World War. Out to the mining town of Kimberley, birthplace of my grandmother, where the General Strike hit hard in the 1920s.</p><p dir="ltr">And finally to the burial ground of the Nottingham General Cemetery and its rows of long forgotten graves.<br>Along the way I paused in public spaces and community cafes, sharing recordings from the archive and chatting to people who generously shared their own stories of the city with me.</p><p dir="ltr"><br>This selection of creative responses draws on some of the words spoken by the narrators in the oral history collection, on fragments of stories found on my journeys, and my own lived experiences and family history. Shaped into forms for the page, these pieces tell some of the hard to hear tales tucked away in the archive: wartime destruction, grinding poverty, back street abortion, industrial unrest. Alongside the complexities and divisions of politics and human relationships, there are also joys found in the lives of our narrators, in their childhood adventures and in the magic of seeing silent cinema for the very first time.</p><p dir="ltr"><br>This project was made possible by an Artist Residency as part of the British Library’s Sharing Our Sounds initiative, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and hosted by the East Midlands Oral History Archive at the University of Leicester’s Archives and Special Collections.</p>