Nicola Benge
Prejudice in Power – UCL
Over the past year I worked as Project Manager alongside a curator, and a designer, on Prejudice in Power, a major institutional programme led by UCL Museums & Cultural Programmes and Special Collections. The project critically examines UCL’s historic role in the development of eugenics and explores how eugenic thinking continues to shape contemporary structural inequalities, including racism, ableism, homophobia and reproductive control.
The programme incorporated oral history as a core methodology, using recorded testimony and filmed interviews to centre lived experience and challenge dominant institutional narratives. Oral histories were recorded with students, academics (including Dr Adam Rutherford), and members of marginalised communities, including disabled people, whose voices have historically been excluded from academic archives and turned into short films.
Living Histories – Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust
I also project managed Living Histories from June 2024- September 2025, a National Lottery Heritage Fund–supported oral history project recording and preserving the experiences of NHS secondary mental health service users, staff and clinicians across Sussex.
The project involved the collection of 35 in-depth oral history interviews exploring experiences of severe mental illness and mental health care. Themes include diagnosis and labelling, stigma, being sectioned, life on psychiatric wards, medication, recovery, family and community support, and the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. The recordings capture emotional, complex and often hidden histories of mental health care from the closure of the old asylums in the 1980s through to the present day.
The oral histories will inform a public exhibition, a dedicated website, a series of printed postcards, and seven themed podcasts created from interview excerpts. The seven podcasts are being produced in collaboration with a BBC podcast producer, using oral history clips to explore the highs and lows of living and working with mental illness.
Recording Our Place – Royal Holloway, University of London / National Trust
(research findings published 2025)
I was brought into project manage Recording Our Place thanks to Padmini Broomfield, a collaborative oral history project led by Royal Holloway, University of London, exploring the relationships between National Trust places and the people who care for, work in and volunteer at them. The project focused on four key National Trust venues and examined what motivates and moves visitors, members, volunteers and staff today.
The oral history fieldwork took place over a four-week period in 2023, supported by MA Public History students from Royal Holloway, who were trained and supported to record interviews.
Although the recording phase took place in 2023, the research findings and public outputs were published in winter 2025. These findings are shared here as part of my reporting period due to their dissemination and impact during this year. The project provides valuable insight into contemporary relationships with heritage places and the role of oral history in capturing affective, place-based experience.
Create, Care, Conserve – Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust
I delivered reminiscence training as part of Create, Care, Conserve, a Heritage Lottery Fund–supported project. The wider programme incorporated oral history alongside other heritage and engagement strands.
Royal Hospital Chelsea – Chelsea Pensioners
I delivered reminiscence training for staff at the Royal Hospital Chelsea, supporting engagement and activity delivery for Chelsea Pensioners. The training focused on practical reminiscence techniques, ethical considerations, and using memory, objects and storytelling to support wellbeing and participation among older residents.
Advisory and Development Work (Oral History and Training)
Over the past year I have met with and advised a number of organisations exploring potential oral history or reminiscence activity, including Brighton Table Tennis Club, regarding the feasibility of oral history training and community-based recording.
I advised Women’s Place UK on the development of a potential oral history project to catalogue and archive their organisational history. While the project did not proceed due to capacity constraints, advice was provided on scope, ethics and sustainability.
I also advised The Lesbian Project on early-stage project management considerations for a potential national oral history project.
I gave a presentation to the Oral History Society Regional Advisers’ Network on the Living Histories project in Nottingham in spring 2025, focusing on the ethical and practical complexities of engagement when working with people with fluctuating capacity, vulnerability and mental health needs:
Padmini Broomfield
It has been a quiet year for me.
I worked on the Mansbridge Heritage Project recording the experiences of local residents of a housing estate in Southampton, which celebrated its centenary in 2025. It was designed by architect Herbert Collins whose work was influenced by the Garden City movement and his strong vision to create well-planned, affordable housing that created a sense of community. The wider programme, led by Abri Housing Association and the University of Southampton, involved the community in workshops, heritage trails and events. I interviewed long-time residents who had seen the growth of and changes in the neighbourhood over the decades. Older interviewees shared memories of Collins and the women rent collectors visiting regularly to ensure that residents kept the common greens and their homes tidy and clean. They described how the layout of the estate and its facilities created a close-knit community overseen by the Swaythling Housing Society. Life stories of older interviewees captured stories of the impact of war on their families, the philanthropic work of the Quakers and others around Collins, and their reflections on the changes they had witnessed, while others commented on present day issues, volunteering at the community café and pantry supporting those in need, and the sense of belonging to the area.
In November 2025, I gave a talk at the Army Museums Ogilvy Trust (AMOT) online coffee break on Getting Started with Oral Histories and about the Oral History Society and its resources. The number of attendees indicated a high level of interest in collecting oral histories and the AMOT website now signposts its members to the OHS website.
As a member of the OHS ECC-SIG (Environmental and Climate Crisis Special Interest Group), I have been supporting its project on International Oral History of Transition Movement. The pilot phase ended with interviews recorded in three countries and results showcased on the project website with plans being made to extend the project to other countries. At the OHS annual conference in Glasgow, Rib Davis and I presented the project on behalf of the group. A blog post by Rib gives an excellent overview of how the project grew from a brief conversation at an OHS conference in 2022.
Anna Cole
Highlights include the recording of 16 new oral histories by trained Youth Ambassadors from the Kent Refugee Action Network (KRAN) interviewing Founders, Staff, Volunteers and fellow Unaccompanied Child Asylum Seekers and service users. Starting in 2023 – KRAN’s 20th anniversary year – the memories of those who built and sustained KRAN were recorded, with Youth Ambassadors Grmalem, Obaida and Shahab carrying out the 16 in-depth interviews. Kent Refugee Action Network (KRAN) was established in 2003 to support young unaccompanied refugees and asylum seekers (UASCs). The new oral history collectionwas launched at the University of Kent’s Templeman Library on Friday, 21 February, 2025.
I also completed work in Aug 2025 as Heritage Lead on a two-year NHLF-funded project ‘Rape Crisis: Exploring the Herstories and Futures of the Movement’ that created the first national Rape Crisis movement oral history archive. This project was led by the national charity Rape Crisis England and Wales (RCEW), in partnership with the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Oxford University and National Life Stories, British Library. Through just over 140 hours of women’s narratives, the oral history collection weaves together a diverse array of experiences from women across England and Wales of differing regions, ages, professional backgrounds, racial and ethnic identities – all of whom made and continue to make indelible contributions to the national rape crisis movement:
The project created a short podcast series for public listening, a rape crisis centre members-only project report, a developmental emergent evaluation for the NHLF, and a British Library Sound and Vision blog.
A playscript based on some of the RCEW oral histories produced with the Viv Gordon company campaign to nurture voice, visibility and community for survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse (CSA).
I was lucky enough to attend and speak about the Rape Crisis Project and the History Safe Toolkit I helped develop from previous oral history work in the Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) sector at the OHS annual conference in Glasgow and the International Oral History Association conference in Kraków.
In Aug 2025 I was pleased to become part of the Regional Advisers’ Network for the South East (based in Portsmouth) and South West (based in Plymouth).
