East Midlands Oral History Archive

Affective Digital Histories

Physical detail

  • Number of items in the collection: 6 interviews
  • Venues where the material can be listened to: digitised copies of interviews available to listen to at EMOHA
  • Media available: digital files

Collection history

Affective Digital Histories was a research project investigating how community ties and bonds have changed, and continue to change, through periods of decline and regeneration of urban landscapes in some of Britain's post-industrial towns and cities. The archival materials that document these changes can be difficult to access and are currently scattered in different places. The University of Leicester was awarded a number of research grants to do the work of collecting, analysing and digitising the data that exists.

In the 1970s, Leicester's Cultural Quarter was a very different place. It hummed with the sound of hosiery machinery and the bustle of industry; the NCP car park was Leicester’s wholesale market; the LCB Depot was a bus depot; Athena was the Odeon cinema; most of the blocks of flats in the area were factories or warehouses. Over the years the sights, sounds and smells of the area have changed dramatically. This project aimed to capture a history of the sounds of Leicester's Cultural Quarter by recording people's feelings and sensory perceptions about the area and how these might have changed over time. There was a particularly interest in the sights, sounds and smells of the 1970s to the 1990s, but memories from all eras were welcomed.

The project ran from October 2013 to March 2015 and was led by the University of Leicester with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

What the collection contains

This set of recordings were specifically made for Black History Month in 2015. They record memories of places and events in and around the St George’s area of Leicester, now known as Leicester’s Cultural Quarter.

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