Oral History - guide to resources: O-S

‘Observing the 80s’ makes available online a number of digitised archival holdings, which relate to the 1980s, from both Mass Observation and the British Library Oral History Collections. The aim of bringing these collections together in an accessible format is to stimulate academic research that spans current approaches to the decade, whilst also encouraging the collections’ use by a wide range of subject disciplines. From the Mass Observation collections, written responses from across the decade by 23 men and women, from a variety of social backgrounds and ages, were chosen for digitisation. The entire audio recordings of 26 interviews from the British Library Oral History Collections were also selected for digitisation.

Topics: People; Politics & Government; Science & Medicine; War & Conflict; Work

Keywords: finance; healthcare; union

[Remote access unavailable as an ongoing consequence of the 2023 British Library cyberattack - title links to relevant interim Sound and Moving Image Catalogue records]
The recordings of 137 items documenting children’s play, folklore, language and literature have been made available for anyone to listen to online through British Library Sounds. The recordings were produced throughout England and Scotland from 1969 to 1983. There are also two sets of recordings made outside the UK, in Oslo, Norway and Capri, Italy.

Topics: Anthropology & Folklore

Keywords: childhood; language; literature

[Remote access unavailable as an ongoing consequence of the 2023 British Library cyberattack - please refer to the interim Sound and Moving Image Catalogue]
As part of their National Life Stories programme, the British Library conducted 200 in-depth life story interviews with contemporary British scientists, engineers and technologists. The interviews are accessible on-site at the British Library and are increasingly being made available online. It was possible to listen to over 60 of the interviews via the British Library Sounds website. As well as being listed alphabetically by name, the interviews are also divided by subject.

Topics: Science & Medicine

Keywords: engineering; environment; medicine; science; technology

Project from 2022-2025 to create an accessible high-quality national archive of oral history recordings with environmental activists in the UK over the last fifty years. Collaboration between Royal Holloway, the National Life Stories Collection at the British Library, the Royal Geographical Society, Friends of the Earth and the Wildlife Trusts. Interviewed 100 carefully selected people involved in protests, policies and practical action since the early 1970s. These interviews will be available to read and listen to at the British Library from January 2026, and a forthcoming book based on these stories will be published by UCL Press.

Topics: People; Politics & Government

Keywords: Activism, environmentalism

[Remote access unavailable as an ongoing consequence of the 2023 British Library cyberattack - please refer to the interim Sound and Moving Image Catalogue]
The complete recordings of 107 oral history interviews with individuals involved in the UK jazz scene are available to listen to through British Library Sounds. The online recordings are only accessible to Higher and Further Education institutions.

Topics: Arts & Culture

Keywords: music

[Remote access unavailable as an ongoing consequence of the 2023 British Library cyberattack - please refer to the interim Sound and Moving Image Catalogue]
The complete audio recordings of 102 interviews with individuals involved in the recording industry are available to Higher and Further Education institutions through British Library Sounds. Interviewees include artists, engineers, managers, producers, musicians, record company personnel, wildlife recordists, journalists and broadcasters.

Topics: Arts & Culture; Science & Medicine; Work

Keywords: engineering; journalism; music; radio

Ongoing project to gather interviews with participants in transition town movements (working for a low-carbon, sustainable future) from Southwest England, Appalachia, and Southwest France. Initiative of the Environment and Climate Change Special Interest Group of the Oral History Society. Interviews available online.

Topics: People; Work; Politics & Government

Keywords: environmentalism; ecology; transition; towns; urban

A collaborative oral history project from Queen Mary University of London, Trinity College Dublin, and Dundalk Institute of Technology, which aimed to collect 100 interviews recording the memories and views of key figures in the Irish peace process since the 1960s. The decision was taken to embargo these interviews for up to 40 years in order to encourage frankness. The project website does provide an extensive list of links to previously conducted interviews regarding the peace process under the Layers of Meaning Online Directory section.

Topics: Politics & Government; War & Conflict

Keywords: art; community; education; politics; sport; union; women

In 2000-2003, the Feminist Archive South conducted a large oral history project that collected the personal memories of women who were involved in the Women’s Liberation Movement in Bristol. Visit this blog to find out more about the project and download excerpts and summaries from the interviews.

Topics: People; Politics & Government

Keywords: feminism; politics; women

Includes in-depth life story interviews with pioneers of British social research – many of whom are eminent scholars in the areas of community studies, anthropology survey and qualitative research – undertaken from 2009-2018. The resource provides a short biography, links to full interviews, interview summaries, thematic extracts and a selective playlist on YouTube, and to any archived research data (Collections) they created. To access the full data set it is first necessary to sign into the UK data service using your institutional login.

Topics: Anthropology & Folklore; Education; People; Work

Keywords: anthropology; sociology

This project, produced by Rowan Arts and funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and Islington Council, used oral history to explore the social and cultural importance of Ironmonger Row Baths and its surrounding area in south Islington. The project website, produced in 2012, provides online access to 65 short audio and transcribed extracts from the interviews.

Topics: Arts & Culture; People

Keywords: community; leisure; sport

This oral history project, undertaken by the University of Warwick in association with Leamington Spa Art Gallery and Museum (LASGM), investigated the changing practice and experience of spa therapy during the second half of the twentieth century. 21 written extracts, from interviews conducted with former staff, patients, and medical practitioners of the Royal Pump Rooms in Leamington Spa are currently available online.

Topics: Science & Medicine; Work

Keywords: healthcare; leisure

The National Railway Museum in York is home to the National Archive of Railway Oral History (NAROH), which contains over a thousand hours of stories from people who worked on the railways. A small number of audio clips from these oral history interviews is accessible on the website, as is a full list of NAROH interviews (PDF) - items in the collection can be consulted at the Museum's library and archive centre.

Topics: Work

Keywords: engineering

Kettle's Yard was the private home of art collector Jim Ede and his wife Helen, and now is a major University of Cambridge collection and temporary exhibition space. From 2008 to 2010, 100 hours of interviews were collected with a variety of people, from family members of Jim Ede to former curators and artists who have exhibited at Kettle’s Yard, such as Edmund de Waal, or people who visited as students, like Sir Nicholas Serota. Audio and transcript extracts from the interviews are available online and are keyword searchable. The full archive is available for research - get in touch with the Kettle's Yard archive and library .

Topics: Arts & Culture

Keywords: art; art_history; music

AJR Refugee Voices is the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR)'s Holocaust testimony collection of 310 filmed interviews with Jewish survivors & refugees from Nazi Europe who rebuilt their lives in Great Britain. The interviews are not available to view online but some may be viewed on the Holocaust Testimony UK portal . All can be viewed by getting in touch with the collection holders. Summaries and clips are accessible on the website.

Topics: People; War & Conflict

Keywords: Holocaust; Jews; migration; refugees; WWII

This website hosts the audio files and transcripts of 30 Welsh songs recorded since the 1960s by David Roy Saer, a former research assistant of what was then the Welsh Folk Museum. The songs form part of a much larger collection held by the National Museum of Wales.

Topics: Culture & Folklore

Keywords: songs, Welsh

This website was created by The Royal Naval Museum in Portsmouth along with a number of supporting partners. It makes accessible online a number of audio extracts from oral history interviews with those who have lived and worked with the sea in the twentieth century. The audio extracts have been divided into five key themes: Women at Sea; Diving into the Past (about the effort to find, excavate and raise the Mary Rose); Naval Medicine; People and Changing Technology; and Family Matters. Most clips now inaccessible after 2020 retirement of Flash.

Topics: Science & Medicine; War & Conflict; Work

Keywords: family; medicine; Navy; technology; women

The physical archive contains thousands of recordings of songs, instrumental music, tales, verse, customs, beliefs, place-names, biographical information and local history. Material comes from all over Scotland and its diaspora, and as well as being a rich repository of oral tradition it is invaluable for its range of dialects and accents in Gaelic, Scots and English. A selection of material from the Archive is available on the Tobar an Dualchais / Kist o' Riches website. Transcriptions of songs, tales, customs, riddles, beliefs and all kinds of oral tradition are published in the journal Tocher .

Topics: Anthropology & Folklore

Keywords: community; folktales; songs; stories; work

There are hundreds of oral history recordings in the combined collections of the Science Museum Group (which includes the Science Museum, Science and Industry Museum, National Science and Media Museum, National Railway Museum and Locomotion), especially on history of the railway, including the National Archive of Railway Oral History and the Britain's Railways All Change project.

Topics: Arts & Culture; Science & Medicine; Work

Keywords: science; museum; railway; train

This project told the history of Sellafield in West Cumbria by means of oral history interviews with 100 people about their personal experiences of the site. Interviewees include senior managers to ‘shop-floor’ employees, as well as local residents and farmers, and anti-nuclear campaigners. Short audio extracts are accessible online. The complete recordings are available to listen to at the Cumbria Archive and Local Studies Centre, Whitehaven.

Topics: Science & Medicine; Work

Keywords: community; industry; politics

[Remote access unavailable as an ongoing consequence of the 2023 British Library cyberattack - title links to relevant interim Sound and Moving Image Catalogue records]
This project recorded oral history interviews with women at the forefront of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Major themes are: Family and Children; Bodies, Minds and Spirits; Sex, Love and Friendship; Race, Place and Nation; Education; Equality and Work; Activism; Politics and Legislation; Changing Cultures and the Arts; and Who We Were, Who We Are. The complete 60 audio interviews and verbatim transcripts are only accessible onsite at the British Library, but extensive content summaries of many of the interviews are available through the British Library Sound & Moving Image Catalogue.

Topics: Arts & Culture; People; Politics & Government; Work

Keywords: education; feminism; politics; race; women

This archive consists of over 500 recordings of Somerset Life made since the 1970s by local historian Ann Heeley and a variety of other individuals and local history groups. They describe, for instance, Somerset’s horsehair weaving, basket-making, willow industry, peat-digging, wassailing, farming and cider-making, and explore how major events touched the lives of ordinary people. A short audio clip from each recording is available to download from the website. The complete recordings are available to listen to at the Somerset Heritage Centre in Taunton and the Somerset Rural Life Museum in Glastonbury.

Topics: Anthropology & Folklore; People; Work

Keywords: agriculture; community; WWI; WWII

[web archived] The Songs of Steel Community Oral History Project interviewed people in Rotherham who worked within the steel industry. Audio and transcribed extracts for the interviews are accessible online, as are a number of poems and songs produced as part of the project. The complete 30 oral history interviews can be listened to by appointment at the Archives and Local Studies Service, located on the first floor of Rotherham Central Library.

Topics: Work

Keywords: industry; WWII

From this page you can access the stories of over 60 South Asians from across the UK, in the form of interviews with people ranging from their early 20s to mid-90s, living in Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England, from different social, cultural, religious and linguistic backgrounds. This Oral History collection is part of 'South Asian Britain: Connected Histories', an interactive digital learning resource where users can access histories of how South Asian people, events and organizations were networked and connected across the four nations of the UK, from the 1830s to the present.

Topics: Arts & Culture; People

Keywords: South Asia; migration; race

This resource provides online access to large portions of oral history and other sound recordings held by The Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge. The list of interviews is arranged alphabetically by interviewee name. The interview transcripts have also been indexed making them keyword searchable. The collection of interviews, captured in India, the U.K. and the USA, is very wide ranging and includes details of the lives and careers of members of the British Army based in India. A small collection of recordings of music and unusual languages is also accessible online.

Topics: Arts & Culture; People; Politics & Government; War & Conflict; Work

Keywords: colonialism; education; industry; journalism; language; missionary; music; politics; women

Speaking Out: Recalling Women’s Aid in Scotland was a two-year project which sought to discover, record, and celebrate the history of Women’s Aid in Scotland. It ran from 2015-2017, and was funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. It gathered oral history interviews with women connected to the Women’s Aid movement, both past and present. On the webpage is a selection of recordings edited from these interviews on a variety of topics. Note that some of the interview subjects discuss issues which some listeners may find upsetting (e.g. details of domestic abuse experience).

Topics: People; Politics & Government; Work

Keywords: Women; women's aid; domestic abuse

The collection is largely made up of interviews with British International Brigade volunteers, but there are also recordings of interviews with medical aid workers, non-British volunteers, Spanish soldiers, Spanish civilians and refugees, and a few with individuals who fought for Franco. Six short extracts from these interviews are available to read and listen to online. The complete collection is accessible at IWM London.

Topics: War & Conflict

Keywords: military history; politics; Spanish Civil War

[Remote access unavailable as an ongoing consequence of the 2023 British Library cyberattack - please refer to the interim Sound and Moving Image Catalogue]
The complete audio recordings of 61 oral history interviews with twentieth-century British sportsmen and women are available for anyone to listen to online through British Library Sounds. The collection includes interviews with tennis players, swimmers, and athletes, as well as with individuals involved in the coaching and teaching of sport.

Topics: Arts & Culture

Keywords: sport

A collection of oral history interviews about the British suffrage movement. The interviews were conducted by the historian Brian Harrison between 1974 and 1981 - the collection consists of 205 interviews with 183 individuals, most of which are available online.
Interviews were conducted with surviving suffrage campaigners, their relatives and employees. Many of the interviewees talk about their relationships with more famous suffrage leaders such as the Pankhursts, Flora Drummond and Millicent Fawcett.
The project also includes discussion of the women’s movement after full enfranchisement in 1928 and interviews are particularly rich in subjects such as politics, trade unionism, international peace activism, women’s employment and family life, and the birth-control movement.

Topics: People; Government & Politics

Keywords: Suffrage; suffragette; women; feminism; trade unionism; peace

Community history and documentary film project from University of Oxford seeing the Syrian crisis from the unique perspectives of refugees now settled in the UK.

Topics: People, War & Conflict

Keywords: Syria, diaspora, refugees