Local & Community History Month 2026

(and some planning ahead for 2027)

 
May is Local and Community History month. For 2026 we are linking it to the year of reading by looking at the importance of writers and local records to historians for bringing a place to life. Places change: that is inevitable and also interesting. New buildings get built, others get torn down and some change purpose. People and families come and go. One of the ways to find out about those changes and to explore the way a place has developed and transformed is to look for local authors and to check local documents. A writer will frequently use a particular place to develop a plot detail, to create atmosphere and to transfer people to a different time. Sometimes the specific place is central to the plot while at other times it is used as simply a backdrop, but in all of these cases a writer can provide a sense of a place and help us to understand how it might have developed.

Furthermore, writers are often shaped by the place they come from and where they live. Where would Thomas Hardy be without Dorset – ‘Wessex’, or Emily Brontë without the moors? Contemporary writers will often spend hours poring over old maps and through public documents at their local archives to ensure that they get a place correct if they are setting a book in the past. Some places are better than others for evoking mystery or a sense of jeopardy while others can help to build suspense or a sense of confusion.

Ask yourself how many times you have been inspired to visit a place because of something you read? The story of a local place and the changes that take place are often crucial to a plot – industrial development, outbursts of societal anger or the experiences of those new to an area, such as Laurie Lee’s As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning and Andrea Levy’s Small Island.

Poetry has cast a similar spell for writers and their readers. Wordsworth’s Lake District, Dylan Thomas’s Wales and more recently Alice Oswald and Devon. And it is not just fiction that highlights the relationship between the place and writers. George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London brings together the grubby, the generous and the dangerous experiences of different places during a time of national and international depression.

Whether it is prose, poetry or biographies, writers help communicate a sense of a place and the realities of that place. As readers we can share that sense of location and feel the emotion of a place as well as having the physical space described to us. So for Local History and Community History Month 2026 we would like to celebrate all the writers that help to bring local histories to life.

They don’t need to be famous – just published. Here are a few items to help inspire you (all open access during May):

• George Eliot and Warwickshire history
• Dickens...Hardy...Jarvis?! A novel take on the Industrial Revolution
• Out and about in D.H. Lawrence country
• Dickens' Kent

If you want to write your own account of a local area and how it has changed, then these might help. For guidance on exploring and understanding local records HA members can use our Short guides to records

Of course, if you wish to ignore the theme and use the month to share and celebrate your local communities and local histories then please go ahead. We always want to hear more.

The Great Debate and local history

The Great Debate is our annual debating competition for students. The question for 2026 was How important are personal and public records as evidence for explaining the story or stories of your local area?

All those who reached the semi-finals have been invited to send a written copy of their talk to the HA and it will be published in May on our website – look out for those.

Local and Community History Month 2027

Thinking ahead to next year – May 2027 is the 300th anniversary of the birth of the British painter Thomas Gainsborough. Gainsborough was famous for his landscapes, even painting many of his portraits outside. Other painters have used their local area either as their muse or to showcase their skill: artists such as L.S. Lowry and Judith Ackland. Therefore, we would like to celebrate art, artists and local history in 2027 – so starting thinking about that as well!