Books / Publications
River Voices
Extraordinary Stories from the Wye (Logaston Press 2018)
River Voices grew from conversations with people whose lives were intimately connected with the River Wye.
The river is usually described through its landscape, wildlife, history and beauty. I wanted to know what it looked like from another perspective:
What does a river mean to the people who actually live and work alongside it?
The result is a collection of extraordinary human stories about lives shaped by the Wye. The book established a theme I have continued to explore ever since: place is not simply somewhere people inhabit. It becomes part of memory, identity, work and belonging.
Years later, that relationship with the Wye continues through my oral-history work on Voices of the Wye, contributing testimony to the development of Hereford Museum.
SCRATCH OF THE HOP
A Social History of Hop Growing in the West Midlands
2021
For generations, hop growing shaped the landscape, working lives and communities of parts of the West Midlands. The Scratch of the Hop explores that world through the memories of the people who knew it.
The story of hop growing isn't only an agricultural history. It is a history of work, skill, family, migration, community, language and tradition. Oral testimony makes it possible to recover details that can easily disappear when an industry changes: how work was actually done, what people called things, the skills learned through experience, the relationships between workers and growers, and the atmosphere of hop picking itself.
The book reflects one of my strongest research interests: the knowledge contained within people's working lives and what can be lost when occupations and industries disappear.
This Stolen Land
A People's History of the Gwent Levels (Seren 2024)
The Gwent Levels are an extraordinary landscape of fields, drainage channels and communities stretching along the shore of the Severn Estuary and the coastline of South Wales.
This Stolen Land approaches that landscape through the people who know it. Drawing on oral testimony and historical research, the book explores how generations have lived, worked and made sense of the Levels — and what their experiences reveal about the relationship between landscape, community, identity and change.
It is a people's history in the fullest sense: an attempt to understand a place not simply through maps, institutions and official records, but through the memories and knowledge of those whose lives are intertwined with it.
This book developed a question that has become increasingly central to my work: What happens when we understand a landscape through the people who have lived and worked within it?
Health Herefordshire (Herefordshire Lore)
Little Herefordshire Histories 2 - Little Herefordshire Histories 2 (Paperback 2020)
his monograph explores local social, cultural, and health history through 60 photographs. Focusing on the history of health in the county of Herefordshire.
Cider Riots
Bartonsham History Society
When the government introduced a cider tax on domestic production in 1763 and gave permission for excise men to enter homes to check, the country was in uproar. Cider Riots occurred across the West Country in particular. In Ledbury, mock funeral processions were held with a barrel of cider on a bier and women dressed in black following behind. One of the heroes of the hour was Herefordshire M.P Velters Cornwall who fought against the tax in parliament. Another Herefordian M.P who was a powerful advocate for cider was Charles Radcliffe Cook. His nickname was the M.P for Cider! Not only did he promote the cider makers’ cause but he wrote a book on the subject and got cider stocked at the House of Commons bar. He lived at Hellens Manor, with its important avenue of rare perry pear trees, and had a close working relationship with his Much Marcle neighbour, the cider makers Westons.
Pride of Place: reminiscence/oral history collaboration between Herefordshire Lore and Connexus Social Housing
Westgate Stories: oral history of Westgate Street for the Cathedral Quarter, Gloucester.
Burakumin: Academic paper
The Burakumin are a 1.5 to 3 million-strong, caste-like minority in Japan, historically marginalized for working in "unclean" occupations (butchery, tanning, undertaking) deemed impure by Buddhist and Shinto traditions. Often called "Japan's untouchables," they were segregated during the Edo period into specific hamlets (buraku). Despite legal emancipation in 1871, they face persistent social discrimination in marriage and employment today.
