Project co-ordinator/Oral Historian
Alan Dein has worked as a freelance oral historian and broadcaster for the past 20 years. He presents documentary features for BBC Radio 4, and has conducted interviews for museums, galleries and the British Library Sound Archive, including a major oral history of the British Steel Industry. He is a committee member of the Oral History Society.
Part-time Volunteers Coordinator
Susan Jellis is a linguist interested in language change and development whose career has been in reference publishing, especially dictionaries, thesauruses and grammar books for native speakers and foreign learners. After many years with, among others, Cambridge University Press and Bloomsbury Publishing plc, she now works freelance. Her role is to manage and support the volunteers who record the stories people have to tell about the Kings Cross area, as well as recording interviews herself.
Former Project Coordinator
Leslie McCartney was the Executive Director of the Gwich'in Social and Cultural Institute, an Aboriginal (North American Indian) organisation located in the Northwest Territories in Canada. The organisation's work included documenting Gwich'in oral history, place name research, ethnoarchaeology, ethnobotany and Aboriginal language revitalisation projects. Prior to this, Leslie was a researcher with the GSCI and conducted a large oral history project documenting the life stories of several Gwich'in Elders.
Joanna is Professor of Oral History in the School of Health and Social Welfare at the Open University. She is joint editor of the journal Oral History and has researched, written and published on oral history and reminiscence for some years. She has a particular interest in older people's remembering and in community oral history work.
Esther is a local resident whose work as a consultant in urban regeneration has involved oral history projects. She is a Governor of Edith Neville Primary School (Somers Town), and has taken part in Camden Education Business Partnership's mentoring scheme in South Camden Community School.
Martin is the Assistant Archivist of the London Borough of Islington Local History Centre. The Centre is on St. John Street, Clerkenwell.
Richard is the Manager of Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre in the Holborn Library.
Catherine Packard has been living and working in the King's Cross area since she was eighteen. She lives with her two daughters on the Hillview Estate, a Victorian housing estate situated on the South side of the Euston Road. Catherine is a local artist whose main practice is inspired by her immediate neighbourhood and everyday human activity. She uses a variety of media including photography, video/film and text to produce and present her works. Catherine is actively involved in the Hillview Residents Association and she has organised various arts events/festivals in the King's Cross area as well as in the East End of London. She is the editor of Cross Section published by Communities in Focus.
Dr. Perks has been Curator of Oral History at the British Library Sound Archive since 1988, and Director of the National Life Story Collection since 1996. He is the secretary of the Oral History Society, a member of the U.S. Oral History Association's International Committee, an Expert Advisor to the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), and acts as an advisor to Qualidata at the University of Essex, The Centre for Life History Research at the University of Sussex, and The National Archive of Railway Oral History. He is a Board Member of the South East Museum, Library and Archive Council (SEMLAC). An editor of Oral History: The Journal of the Oral History Society, his publications include Oral History, Health and Welfare (Routledge, 2000), The Oral History Reader (Routledge, 1998, second edition currently in preparation), Ukraine's Forbidden History (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 1998), Oral History: Talking about the past (Historical Association, second edition 1995), and Voices of the Holocaust: a cross-curricular resource pack (British Library, 1993). He is also an editorial board member of the Journal of the Society of Archivists. He was Co-ordinator of the Millennium Oral History Project, a collaborative initiative between the British Library and BBC Regional Broadcasting, and the largest oral history project ever mounted in Britain.
Lisa has lived in Islington for 16 years. She has been involved in local community campaigns around King's Cross in the areas of planning, building, conservation and environment. After a modern history degree and postgraduate film studies, she became a professional archive film researcher for many years working for BBC/Open productions on developing the use of film as a historical document. Later she freelanced mainly for independent TV production companies. In 1980 Lisa briefly worked on a community education project on the Isle of Dogs and started an oral history project there. Lisa took a primary teaching qualification as a mature student, (PGCE) then worked for 2 years as a specialist video playcentre assistant in Camden.
Robert works as the National Lottery Officer for the London Borough of Camden. In addition he is the Treasurer of the Oral History Society and outside work is part of a local group recording oral testimonies in north east London.
Pat Farrington was Project Manager of the Writers in Schools Project (funded by Cripplegate Foundation and supported by and the London Borough of Islington), and did two projects with Blessed Sacrament and Winton Primary Schools on the King?s Cross redevelopment. Both schools produced an 8-page newsletter written by the children. With other primary schools outside the Kings Cross area, she did a number of writing projects including an element of oral history, which she enjoyed, leading her to volunteer for the Kings Cross Voices project.
Jessica Higgs has lived in Islington for 35 years. She is a freelance director and voice coach working in live theatre and in acting training. She is also the Artistic Director of her own theatre company, In Tandem TC.
Ally Ireson is a freelance writer and book editor who specialises in projects relating to social or historical culture. Recent jobs have included an introduction to a photographic book on the inhabitants of Britain's oldest model village; and writing about watermills, 19th-century female novelists and fish and chips for an online portrait of the cultural icons of England: www.icons.org.uk.
Susan Jellis is a linguist interested in language change and development whose career has been in reference publishing, especially dictionaries, thesauruses and grammar books for native speakers and foreign learners. After many years with, among others, Cambridge University Press and Bloomsbury Publishing plc, she now works freelance. Living for some years on the edge of the area covered by the project, she has come to know many people who have lived there all their lives as well as others who have arrived from all over the world and is pleased to have the opportunity to collect and preserve their stories in their own words.
Dr Sue Kinder is a part-time lecturer in history of medicine at Birkbeck College, specialising in Victorian alternative medicine. She has lived in Islington, just north of King?s Cross, for nearly 20 years. She became involved in the King?s Cross Oral History Project because she wanted to find out more about the lives of those who lived in King?s Cross, which is the station she associates with her home town of Lincoln and the North, and where she herself has lived for so long.
Riza Momin worked near the King's Cross area for five years until the work was outsourced to Australia in 2005. While working there, she obtained an MSc in Social Research Methods from London Metropolitan University. The course included an introduction to oral history interviewing, so naturally, Riza jumped at the opportunity to take part in the King's Cross Voices oral history project. Through the project, Riza has also seen parts of King's Cross that she was never even remotely aware of in her five years of working there.
Barbara Prynn is a social worker specializing in work with adults separated by adoption, and a part-time lecturer at the Tavistock Centre. She has carried out oral history projects with adoptive families, with people who grew up in the care system and with former workers in child care. The findings of these projects have been disseminated in lectures and publications.
Giles Rollestone is an interactive media designer and information architect. Giles has over fourteen years experience in the conceptual design, development and implementation of software-based tools and digital media experiences; nine years in the New Media industry and five years in Education and Research at the Royal College of Art, London. Currently, Giles is a PhD candidate at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts and is doing research into the visualization of the emotional content of speech. As part of his research he is working as an oral history volunteer an interviewer with the King's Cross Voices Oral History Project, London.
Robert Stephenson is a mature Geography graduate from Brunel University with a keen interest in and love of London and its geographies. Originally attracted to the Project by the eclectic nature of King's Cross, its peoples and environs and memories of travels through the area from the 1950s to the present day, he has been involved in transcribing many of the interviews completed since 2004 in his role as a freelance researcher. Additionally, he has interviewed residential boat dwellers living on the Regent's Canal adjacent to King's Cross and St Pancras stations and will be a permanent residential boater himself in the Summer of 2006.
Sarah is a London based portrait photographer, who has been working in editorial for three years. Clients include: W Magazine, Rolling Stone, The Face, The Independent Magazine, The Telegraph Magazine, Harpers & Queen. She trained at the London College of Printing after studying Philosophy at Edinburgh University. Sarah's portraits of people interviewed in King's Cross Voices are an excellent addition to the project. See Sarah's website
at http://www.sarahweal.com.
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Verusca Calabria is doing an MA in Life Histories research and works as an oral historian for the Italian community in Clerkenwell, London. She recorded interviews with members of the Italian community in King?s Cross for the project.
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