In Great Yarmouth, 350 recorded oral histories sit in a museum archive, waiting to be formally catalogued and expanded with new voices. This project addresses a gap in how coastal change is remembered. Official histories of Great Yarmouth tend to focus on economic shifts—the collapse of herring fishing, the move to offshore energy, the rise of tourism. But the lived experiences of people who weathered these transformations are often missing, especially those of women and migrants. The project will analyse existing oral histories and record 15–20 new ones to capture these overlooked perspectives. If successful, the research will change what the Time & Tide Museum holds and displays. The oral histories will be formally accessioned into the museum’s permanent collection, making it more representative of the local community. New digital and physical exhibits will present alternative histories that weave together environmental, economic, and social change. The project’s analysis of how people adapted to past upheavals may offer lessons for Great Yarmouth’s current challenges—such as coastal erosion, economic diversification, and community resilience—though the primary outcome is a richer, more inclusive historical record, not a policy blueprint.
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Time & Tide’s (T&T) Maritime Collections document the transformation of Norfolk’s coastal livelihoods, for example: the decline of once-iconic herring fisheries, the landscape-changing offshore transition of the energy industry, and evolving tourism occupations. At T&T, 350 research-ready oral histories in the Great Yarmouth Voices Collection offer vital accounts of the lived experiences of this rapid change. Drawing on the power of personal storytelling in shaping our collective history, this project offers new ways of conceptualising the town’s interdependent relationship with the coast. By analysing the existing oral histories, and collecting new ones, this project will offer alternative histories of coastal change incorporating environmental as well as economic and social processes. The project will deliver community-focused interventions both in the museum’s digital and physical galleries celebrating the new histories produced. It provides significant impact at T&T through the formal accessioning of the (already-categorised, digitised and partially transcribed) oral histories into the Museum. A lasting legacy of the project will be the recording of 15-20 new oral histories that enhance Museum holding by adding diverse voices (e.g. people with experience of migration and women), making T&T’s holdings more reflective of the local community. The project’s analyses of lived experience offer lessons for the intersecting challenges facing Great Yarmouth today. Oral histories can be a powerfully accessible tool in reaching marginalised communities and this project will use this potential to explore coastal resilience in Great Yarmouth through programming and dissemination.
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