Situation

Who lived on this street, who ran the shop, and what was it like?

You've moved into a house and want to know who lived in it. There was a shop on the corner and your grandmother says the woman who ran it looked after half the street. A road was knocked down for a ring road and you want to know what was there before. The records will give you names, dates and a census return. They will not tell you what it was like.

More than five million people in England are over seventy-five, and roughly two in five households headed by someone over sixty-five have lived in the same home for thirty years or more. Between them they hold the memory of every street in the country, and almost none of it is written down. When one of them dies, it goes.

What people ask

• Who lived in my house before me, and what were they like?
• What was this street like in the 1970s — not the photographs, the life?
• Who ran the shop on the corner, and what happened to them?
• What was here before the ring road, the estate, the retail park?
• Is there anyone left who remembers?
• How do I ask an older neighbour without it being strange?

What no search can return

A search returns recorded memory: oral-history recordings, memoir pages on local history sites, council heritage features, old photographs. All of it is valuable and none of it can be asked a follow-up question. The person who remembers is usually within a mile of the place, is not online, and would answer gladly if asked the right way by the right person. Finding them is a matter of rooms, not pages.

Where the people who have been through it gather

• Local history societies — there are well over a thousand in Britain, most with an enquiries address and a monthly meeting.
• u3a local-history groups, lunch clubs, sheltered housing schemes, the WI and parish churches, where the people who remember already gather.
• Local studies libraries and county record offices, whose staff know who the rememberers are.
• City-specific forums such as the Historic Coventry Forum, where living people answer each other about places that have gone.

Open questions in this situation

Questions nobody has answered yet, kept here so that they can at least be found.

• What was it like living on a council estate in the 1970s — from someone who did?
• Who remembers the shop that used to be on the corner?

This page lists places and organisations, not people. Nobody is named on this site and there is nothing to join. About this site.