In this post, Eve Pennington describes the use and value of oral history in her study of the Lancashire new town of Skelmersdale.
As Eve argues, oral history offers creative approaches to urban history, helping us better appreciate the motivations, expectations and actions of residents. The result is a narrative of urban development that is often at odds with those found in the official reports of planners and councils.
In 2024-25, Eve held a Royal Historical Society Centenary PhD Fellowship and has recently submitted her doctorate for which she studied at the University of Manchester.
Throughout the twentieth century, towns and cities across the United Kingdom and the world were transformed by urban development projects orchestrated by the state.
While it’s essential to examine the ideas and actions of the architects, planners, policy makers, and developers that drove these transformations, urban historians must also explore people’s everyday experiences of living in new built environments in order to fully understand the causes, consequences, and meanings of urban change.
Oral history is an essential tool for accessing the spatial experiences of groups that are marginalised in archival sources and overlooked in existing urban scholarship, including women, low-income people, global majority people, disabled people, and LGBT people. Oral history helps us understand the ways that residents used buildings, the subjective meanings they attached to them, and their agency to transform the built environment in accordance with their own needs.
My PhD thesis explores the relationship between gender and urban development in three new towns that were established in north-west England in the 1960s and 1970s to provide housing and employment for people from existing towns and cities. It analyses archival material produced by urban planners, managers, and policy makers, as well as oral history interviews I conducted with fourteen women who lived and/or worked in the towns during the late twentieth century.
To illustrate the value of using oral history, this post offers one example from my research of how an interviewee’s personal testimony offered vital insight into understanding women’s agency to use and produce space in ways that questioned, and even subverted, the expectations of planners and policy makers.
Land use plan for Skelmersdale new town, c.1964. From JR James Archive https://flic.kr/p/fqdpqp/, CC BY-NC 2.0
In 1961, Skelmersdale in Lancashire was designated a new town with the aim of providing homes and jobs for people from Liverpool. However, by the mid-1970s, the town was struggling due to economic problems.
The closure of two major factories led to high unemployment, families moved elsewhere in search of work, and hundreds of houses were left empty. Skelmersdale Development Corporation—the public body charged with planning the town, and building and renting out most of its housing stock—struggled to re-let the vacant properties due to deterioration and vandalism. To resolve this, in the early 1980s they organised a ‘discretionary sales scheme’ in which the empty properties were sold at a discounted price, reflecting their condition.
In their 1981 annual report, the Development Corporation noted that ‘the standard of improvement achieved by purchasers was of a very high order and demonstrated what can be done by enterprising purchasers at a modest cost’. Sales, the report continued, had ‘generated a wider interest in house purchase throughout the town’.
Told through the archival documents produced by the Development Corporation, this story is indicative of the decline of publicly rented housing due to socio-economic problems, the rise of individualistic forms of homeownership and home improvement, and the shift from social democratic to neoliberal forms of governance during the late-twentieth century.
Housing built by Skelmersdale Development Corporation in the late 1960s. From JR James Archive https://flic.kr/p/fAjb27, CC BY-NC 2.0
Oral history tells a somewhat different story.
Margret[1] moved to Skelmersdale from Liverpool in the 1970s with her husband and three children. They rented a Development Corporation house on an estate with a growing number of empty properties. ‘I was the only one left on that block in the end after about eighteen months, they’d all gone’, she remembered, ‘by then my marriage had broken up and my husband had gone as well’.
In the early 1980s, Margret bought one of the vacant houses through the Development Corporation’s sales scheme. However, the house was derelict. ‘Oh God it was a nightmare’, she remembered, ‘there was no lights. There was no plumbing. There was no windows. There was no doors. […] Erm, there was a kitchen cupboard, one. Err the sink was there. I think that was about it’. She explained that ‘what everyone did, they bought […] the houses and then they went and took things out of other houses to put in them, y’know and that’s what we did, ‘cause we didn’t have any money’. Her use of ‘everyone’, ‘we’, and ‘they’ suggests that this opportunistic DIY was a common practice.
She recalled that:
We found a toilet, well, we helped ourselves to a toilet from somewhere, […] and we used to find- well find doors, but I can remember I used to have a trolley on wheels and I used to go and pick these doors up.
[…] And, we used to get window boards, […] everybody had a shed made of window boards ‘cause everyone used to pinch them off the empty houses. Erm, but gradually we got it done y’know and we moved into it and it was alright.
The words ‘find’, ‘pick’, and ‘pinch’ imply that Margret did not understand this as actual theft. The houses had been abandoned by their former tenants and the Development Corporation, meaning the contents were perceived as either unowned or owned by the local community.
By taking fixtures and fittings from derelict houses, Margret and her neighbours used collective social action to navigate economic hardship. In the process, they consciously questioned the state’s neglect of its housing stock, and they created a community based on communal understandings of ownership.
While the Development Corporation’s report celebrated the ‘standard of improvement’ achieved by ‘enterprising purchasers’, Margret’s testimony offers a different perspective and indicates how some purchasers challenged the individualistic strains of homeownership that characterised the rise of neoliberalism during the 1980s. Her memories facilitate an alternative reading of the decade, highlighting subversive spatial experiences that contradict the archival sources produced by elite men in positions of power.
Margret’s testimony shows that urban historians must collect personal testimonies, particularly from groups whose voices are silenced, muted, or distorted in planning and policy documents.
Oral history is a crucial methodology if we are to understand their agency to alter the form and meaning of the built environment and claim urban space as their own.
[1] Margret’s name is a pseudonym.
About the author
Eve Pennington has recently submitted her PhD in History at the University of Manchester, which was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. In 2024-25 she held a Royal Historical Society Centenary Fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London.
Eve has published her research in The Historical Journal, and in September 2025, she takes up a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Worcester, as well as a lecturer position at the University of Manchester.
HEADER IMAGE: Women walking to work in Skelmersdale, c.late-1960s. From JR James Archive https://flic.kr/p/fA4R42, CC BY-NC 2.0
