For many young people, history is something that happened somewhere else to people entirely unlike and unconnected to their lives. When, in the 1970s, the leaders of the Schools Council History Project first enshrined local history in its principles and practice, they were recognising this sense of alienation and seeking to make apparent the ‘History Around Us’ all.

Countless history teachers, in many parts of the world, have also built local history projects with a determination to remove that alienation. When De Silva and Hughes (TH 151) designed a study of a local London street for their Year 7s, their goal was personal connection. When Harcourt, a New Zealand history teacher, devised a local place-based study on downtown Wellington, he did so in the wake of an alarming discovery: his students assumed that nothing that had happened in New Zealand could be deemed historically significant!2 The same phenomenon was observed by Bates and Bowry (TH 185), whose students could not believe that the ‘nowhere town of Andover’ had ever been historically significant. In Oxford, Burn and Todd (TH 170) found that students living less than a mile beyond the medieval gates felt that the history of the city was nothing to do with them, and that the specific streets and communities in which their lives played out had in essence no history at all...