I think history has interested me for most of my life, if only from a tendency to romanticise. As a small child my imagination lived in the past, taking every train journey as an evacuee escaping blitzed London. I still romanticise; I love modernist literature, the Romantics, and also historical costume, using my spare time (sometimes) to attempt to craft hoop skirts from irrigation piping and searching Portobello Road for vintage sweater vests. I am beyond lucky to live in London, which is truly a palimpsest of a city: it breaths history. I love that you can feel it in the brickwork, with faded adverts painted on bare walls, the shell damage of the museums along Exhibition Road, the innumerable blue plaques. At university, in Edinburgh, when walking across The Meadows in the footsteps of the Brodie set, I think of ‘their destination…the Old Town, for Miss Brodie had said they should see where history had been lived’.
I enjoyed history all the way through school, and although I am currently studying English Literature, I am not quite ready to let historical research go completely. For this reason, combined with my love of social and material history, after searching for something to fill the endless string of days locked down, I was drawn to the Institutional History Society and their individualised case study histories. I thought the idea of salvaging voices from fragments of prison records seemed a fascinating opportunity and liked the thought that doing so was somehow a fulfilment of posthumous justice. As well as gaining some interesting insights into Britain’s prison history, I hope that I will be able to promote the society’s work to a wider audience and share the incredible work they do for history’s forgotten voices.