Beck Heslop, Social Studies of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester (2022 Cohort)

Since the main archive I had planned to use has admitted to me that they probably won’t be re-opening any time soon after all, I have had to be creative to find materials relevant to my topic. That is why, over the first one hundred weeks of my PhD, I have visited ten different archives across England. That’s translated to somewhere around four weeks sitting in reading rooms going through tape recordings, papers, microfiche, and one television documentary. Everything ranging from tiny rooms in basements of local museums to the grand corrals in the National Archives.

Not all rabbit holes have turned up useful material. I spent a few hours in Bury archive rifling through fire-singed papers about Road Safety, not to find a single reference to white sticks or even blindness (my topics of interest). I also spent months planning a trip to the BBC written archives in Reading, spending a day travelling with cancelled trains, only to finish going through all of the ordered materials within two hours. Then, my trip to the British Library was thwarted by the cyber-attack that they are still reeling from.

On the other hand, there have been some gems. I have been back and forth to the Charles Parker Archive in Birmingham more times than I can count, listening to interview tapes from 1967. This Summer, my favourite trip was to Bournemouth University to consult their special collection of materials from In Touch – a radio programme by and for blind people that started in the 60s. It’s a treasure trove of tapes, newsletters, and correspondence that evidence blind people’s responses to now well-established technologies like the long cane, as well as their own inventions, hacks, and creativity. I wish that I could have had more time with the collection. But, as it was, I only just managed to get my visit in before they closed their doors to researchers for a year on account of lack of funding.

That is to say, archival research is a mixed bag of excitement and disappointments in terms of materials alone. Add to that the precarity of the archives themselves and it’s quite the emotional roller coaster. Visiting a range of archives has given me a much greater appreciation for the work that archivists do, the challenges they face with funding, and the gap there often is between preserving history and making it accessible to the public.