Coeficiente de conductividad térmica de los ladrillos

The questions asked of the interviewees depended on context. General questions were asked of all interviewees, in order to establish a context for the interview, but the oral history recording did not comprise a series of life history interviews, of the kind that were collected for the BBC and British Library’s ‘The Century Speaks’ millennium project (British Library, n.d.), with each interview being undertaken over a period of many hours. Instead, the specific questions that comprised each interview depended on individual circumstances, such as the interviewee’s relationship with the local authority or landlord, or the amount of time spent living in social housing. The answers that interviewees gave then opened up other avenues for research.

Project participants were long-standing estate residents or former residents, with an existing relationship to the community. This approach did, however, mean excluding those who were relative newcomers to the estates, those who had moved further away, and those who did not have a residential relationship with the estates; namely policy makers, estate managers, social workers and local institutions. While

interviewing a greater range of participants with varying views and experiences of

engaging with social housing would have extended the scope of the project, and may have provided further insight into the internal complexity of the communities under study, those insights would not have been in such great detail; an understanding of the experiences of non-residents as they relate to this research has been gained from the secondary analysis of existing oral history archives and documentary research.

The oral history testimonies provided insight at the scale of:

 The home

 The individual street or building

 The neighbourhood

 The estate

 The world outside the estate. Work, shopping, leisure. Family and friends.

The oral history questions were targeted at each of these scales. In contrast to the built heritage recording, which concentrated on the physical manifestation of late nineteenth and early twentieth century concepts of the modern and new in the built environment of social housing, the oral history interviews with residents targeted how perceptions of home, and its place in the wider landscape of the housing estate, have evolved. Linda Shopes (2002, 596) draws attention to the importance of approaching interviews in a spirit of critical enquiry; ‘this means asking the hard questions that may cause discomfort, that address difficult or controversial topics that may reveal

ruptures in the community’. While the aim was to avoid causing interviewees

discomfort, and instead for them to find the process interesting and useful – this did mean asking questions that touched on issues of money, rent, expectations and values, exclusion, gender dynamics and social divisions within the community.

Interview topics included:

 Biographical information; date and place of birth, what their parents' and their own main jobs were, placing subsequent information in its social context.

 Where they lived before moving onto the estate, and what it was like.

 What their present home was like when they moved in, and what they thought of it.

 Have they carried out any building work or decorating on their home?

 What did they do on their first day living on the estate?

 Family and friends who live nearby.

 Describe a typical day on the estate now – from when they get up until they go to bed.

 Leisure and social life (clubs and societies, gardening)

 Shopping.

 What happens when friends and family come to visit.

 Favourite room in the house/flat.

As this project involved non-clinical research concerning human subjects, a project proposal and ethics approval form were submitted and ethical approval was obtained from the Departmental Ethics Officer for the conduct of oral history interviews. The audio recordings were collected using a solid-state recorder, which produced archive-stable WAV files. Once recordings were made, written summaries were produced which broke each recording into 5-minute segments, and a description was written for each segment; this allowed for only material necessary to the research to be

transcribed. Where participants have agreed, the WAV files and written summaries will be archived with the British Library Sound Archive, as the case study sites are spread across the country; this enables the use of a single series of reference numbers for recording and archiving.

Conclusions

This chapter has examined the methodologies used to consider the three social housing estates that form this thesis’s case studies, and has considered what it means to take a distinctly archaeological approach when undertaking archaeologies of the recent past. Whether extending the use of classic archaeological methods to modern material, or focusing on an archaeological engagement with contemporary society,

archaeologists undertaking contextual and interpretive archaeologies of the recent past face the problems associated with an abundance of data. Contemporary archaeologists also face the difficulties associated with examination of the familiar;

Buchli and Lucas’s 2001 study of a recently abandoned council flat has been criticised for making assumptions about the meanings of objects to others, because of their familiarity. Barb Voss has stated that archaeologies of the contemporary past call into question the methods and fundamental assumptions that archaeologists make about the relationship that people have with society and the material world, but also suggesting that we are at risk of undertaking an archaeology of ‘us’.

This study aims to consider the ongoing impacts of the built environment and past decisions made about it, both in the past and the present, while making use of

methods that reflect the collaborative nature of contemporary archaeology, borrowing methods and approaches from the humanities and social sciences. The following three chapters set out the case study areas researched for this thesis, namely the Warren Farm Estate in Kingstanding, Birmingham; the Bevington Street area of Vauxhall, Liverpool; and the Peabody Trust estate in Bethnal Green, London.

Chapter Four: Warren Farm Estate, Kingstanding,