Affective Digital Histories: Re-creating Britain's De-industrial Places, 1970s to the Present

This collection contains digitised resources created and repurposed by the AHRC Affective Digital Histories project. The project investigates 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. Leicester's Cultural Quarter and Glossop's Howard Town and Whitfield Ward are the foci of archival, digital and commissioned work undertaken by a team of academics at the University of Leicester and external partners.

The period from the 1970s to the 1990s form the backdrop to stories 'out there' that have not been told or researched for what they can tell us about people's emotional 'feel' for a place that they and their community might have been part of in the late twentieth-century of British manufacturing history.  These stories form an important tapestry of information about how certain communities think about, feel and use physical spaces that have undergone regeneration in recent decades. In Leicester, for instance, these include dance halls, rave venues and alternative clubs for a variety of uses.

This project, therefore, aims to bring together existing research on historical and heritage sites that have fallen into disuse and/or disrepair and that are now undergoing some kind of regeneration by city and local councils. Having done this, the researchers and community participants will then work closely together to develop a digital archive of open and publicly accessible data that forms a repository of some of the stories of communities that used, worked and played in these buildings.  

Further information on this collection can be found on our webpages:

http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/management/research/affective

The Affective Digital Histories project is funded by the AHRC Capital Funding Call for Digital Transformations in Community research Co-Production in the Arts and Humanities.