This website hosts two mental healthcare heritage projects led by Dr Verusca Calabria and supported by a team of researchers at Nottingham Trent University, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
Middle Street Resource Centre: the Heritage of Wellbeing in the Community
2022 marked the 50th year of Middle Street Resource Centre in Beeston, Nottingham. For over half a century, the Centre has been supporting the wellbeing of thousands of local people with enduring mental ill health who are socially excluded from mainstream society.
From September 2022 to April 2024, the Centre’s users, their allies, and local residents, including young people, are helping to document and celebrate the Centre’s hidden history using arts and crafts, oral histories, reminiscence, poetry and visual methods, thanks to a grant of £98000 from the National Lottery Heritage Fund. The audio-visual exhibition containing the stories of people who have been part of this project can be viewed here. The project activities to date are also captured in this blog. Click here to view a list of project events.
Hidden Memories of Nottingham Mental Healthcare
In the period from June 2020 to February 2021, a team of researchers collected nineteen oral histories from seventeen participants, namely former nurses, social workers, and carers who remembered the transition from mental hospitals to care in the community in the 1990s. Due to COVID-19, the oral histories were collected remotely.
To access the audio-visual exhibition showcasing the oral histories collected for the Hidden Memories project about the hidden history of mental healthcare in Nottingham from the 1960s to the 1990s, please visit the audio-visual exhibition.