Webber Street: A Collection Of Poems Based On The History Of A Social Housing Estate

This thesis is a reflective account of the process of a practice based research project to write poems from materials related to the history of the social housing estate I live on. I wanted to explore ‘where I am located’ in this way to be able to develop my own actual spoken voice and be able to use it more within my poetry. I decided that the route into this might best be sought via social history, as that has, over the last fifty years or so, developed a better relationship with working class subjects than lyric poetry, which is the ‘tradition’ that I write in.

The voice for working class women, as characters in literature, has tended to be either faux naif or crude. Tony Harrison has identified this as being also problematic for Yorkshire men the ones ‘Shakespeare gives the comic bits to’ (2006: 107). This restricted me in my range as a writer of working class origin and I needed to find ways to overcome it. Having been involved in my local community, both as a poet and participant, in local heritage or community history projects, I felt that there was something to learn about how history treats the working class voice.

There are six chapters in the theses. Chapter One is an introduction explaining the research and background to the problem. Chapter Two is about the actual flat and the estate that it is part of, which is considered against a backdrop of ideas about homes and the imagination by Gaston Bachelard and Juhani Pallasmaa. Chapter Three explores ideas and process involved in archival research. Chapter Four is about voice and memory, comparing the intersections between contemporary dialect writing and oral history transcripts and looking at how memory is considered in both. Chapter Five considers history as a discipline and the referenced essay as a definition of what history is. Chapter Six concludes the whole.

The thesis argues that in working in this way, I have managed to find a way that I can feel confident using my own spoken and actual voice as part of the range available to my ‘writer’s voice’. I also conclude that during the time of this research, things have changed in contemporary poetry and that means there is a bigger audience willing to engage with this kind of writing.