Plymouthhistory

THE
WAR
IN
PLYMOUTH
In April 2013 we were awarded a Heritage Lottery Grant to develop a three-year oral history
project entitled The War in Plymouth: Destruction and a New Beginning.
During the terrible Blitz on Plymouth during the Second World War, over 4,000 homes were
destroyed. The City’s response, encapsulated in the Abercrombie Plan, was dynamic, and over
the course of ten years between 1945 and 1955, over 17,000 new homes and 24 new schools
were built, creating new neighbourhoods such as Southway and Efford.
This project, working in association with the History Department at Plymouth University under the
guidance of Professor Kevin Jefferys, aims to gather as many interviews as possible with
Plymouth people who remember the war years and the years of social housing. Going out into
people’s homes, we are recording and preserving these memories, with the aim in 2015 of
publishing a summary and overview in physical and digital formats, and in the shape of a touring
exhibition.
We will be working with members of the community in Plymouth who would like to join the project
in a number of ways – either as an interviewer or as an interviewee or as a voluntary transcriber
The project is entirely shaped by the perspective of the people of Plymouth: what was their
experience of war, and how did the city emerge from it into a new era?
We will be working with Fotonow, the Plymouth-based photographic social enterprise, who will be
enabling Plymouth people to produce a photographic record of our interviewees to sit alongside
the oral history recordings.
If you would like to join the project either as an interviewee, telling us your memories of the period;
or as an interviewer, going out and conducting interviews, then do please contact us by going to
the Contact page on this site, or taking a look at the project Facebook page
The project is working closely with Plymouth University (which awarded us a Vice-Chancellor’s
Community Award), local historian Chris Robinson, Plymouth and West Devon Record Office,
Plymouth Museum. The project is supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund.
LATEST NEWS
Our project, is coming to a close at the end of this summer, as we are pretty close to completing
all the interviews we have been able to do under the remit of this project. But, we are still looking
for volunteer transcribers to transcribe the many fascinating interviews we have conducted, and
we would really welcome hearing from any one who might be able to work with us typing out the
interviews - so that we have a written copy of each one (the interviews tend to be about an hour
long). If anyone would like to get involved on this side of the project, then do please contact me at:
tam@thewordmachine.org