Middlefield: A Postwar Council Estate
- Submitting institution
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University of Lincoln
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 44313
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
-
-
- Location
- -
- Brief description of type
- Publication, community collaboration, practice
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month
- December
- Year
- 2020
- URL
-
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- Supplementary information
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-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Context and Rationale
Middlefield: A Postwar Council Estate is being submitted as a multi component output as it represents a sustained, cross-disciplinary, research-into-practice ‘micro-study’ of a 1960s council estate at Middlefield Lane, Gainsborough, Lincolnshire.
Research Process, Roles & Contribution
Waites grew up on the estate during the 1960s and 70s, thus allowing auto-ethnography to produce a guide to the estate’s topology and material culture, and reflections on how the estate’s outward appearance gives expression to its inner life. Waites co-coordinated a number of collaborative, practice-based community engagement activities on the estate, the results were critically assessed in published form, while the AHRC funded ‘Exploring Middlefield’s Archaeology’ project (Co/I, May 2016), created the first-ever communal archaeological excavation of a council estate: seventy residents carried out test-pit explorations of their gardens, and communal, pedestrianized ‘greens’. Study of the early development and planning of the estate directly influenced the choice of sites for excavation, while the excavation’s findings were discussed in a publication that analyses the nature of everyday childhood on the estate in relation to the way it was planned. Waites’ research pursues three lines of enquiry: form (architecture, planning, and material reality), function (how the form nurtured a sense of community), and feeling (interpretive analysis of the estate via certain phenomenological constructions of everyday life, sense of place, childhood, and memory).
Insights
The project adds significant new evidential weight to its argument that the ideals and actions of 1960s council estate planners met contemporary social needs and challenges the common notion that the decline of such estates can be ascribed to inherent weaknesses in their original design or to their misuse by residents.
Sharing
Dissemination of the work/findings include participation in a BBC Radio 4 programme for the series ‘Making History’ recorded on site at Middlefield on 27 June 2017.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -