Reflections of Trauma, Challenges and Healing: An Oral History

05/12/2025

Did you grow up in Glasgow or surrounding areas? Do you have any stories or photographs you’d like to send in of Make do and Mend and/or upcycling or recycling from the past or now? Please read on. Thanks!

07/11/2025

Are you interested in social history? There is still time for volunteer researchers and writers and artists to participate in this wonderful project! Go on - contact Glasgow Story Collective today!

12/10/2025

Please check Glasgow Story Collective’s page out. If you like what you see then please take a minute to vote for our exciting and well engaged with community oral history project called Marmite Housing. We’re in the North West category. The project is active in the North Highlands as well as the Glasgow area.

Thanks to our wonderful volunteers, respondents and supporters, your amazing 'Marmite Housing' oral history project has made the shortlist - now it’s over to YOU!
The public is officially one of the judges, so your vote counts just as much as theirs.
Please help us bring home the win by voting here - the project covers wider Glasgow and we're in the North West category:
https://www.glasgowtimes.co.uk/community-champion-awards/

The National Lottery Heritage Fund Scotland
Past & Futures Society
Strathclyde Heritage Group
's Southside+ Stories

14/09/2025

A brave lady who fought for change. x

In 1860, Elizabeth Packard had been married for 21 years and was raising six children when her husband did something unthinkable: he had her committed to an asylum.
Not because she was violent. Not because she was unstable. But because she dared to think differently. She questioned his strict Calvinist beliefs, and in Illinois at the time, a husband could institutionalize his wife without trial, proof, or consent.
Inside the asylum, Elizabeth quickly discovered the truth: many women there weren’t “mad” at all. They were wives who resisted, daughters who disobeyed, women who refused to be silent. Instead of breaking, Elizabeth wrote, observed, and waited.
After three years, she stood in court, defended her right to her own thoughts, and won her freedom. But she didn’t stop there. She wrote books exposing wrongful confinement, lobbied lawmakers, and pushed through reforms that made it harder for women to be silenced under the label of insanity.
Elizabeth Packard chose truth over silence. Her fight cost her nearly everything — but gave countless women the protection she was denied.
�~Old Photo Club

22/07/2025

05/07/2025

Please get in touch to hear how you can contribute to this exciting community oral history project.

30/05/2025

Calling on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to amend the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman Act 2002 to allow for a two-year complaints period for people with cognitive disabilities.

07/05/2025

Professional oral history interview skills training is taking place, for this exciting new community oral history project, in Glasgow City Centre on Saturday the 14th of June. Spaces are limited. Please see contact details below if you would like to share your memories with the project and/or take up one of our volunteering opportunities. Thanks!

"Marmite Housing"-Glasgow's Post-war Housing: A People's History

Respondent Mike Kelly at 4 Barnkirk Avenue, Drumchapel in 1957 and again on a visit from America in 1999.

He tells us that:
"In the composite 1999 / 1957 photos I'm posing with a shovel. I remember all the wives up No. 4 had been complaining that the area around the 4 clothes drying poles was sometimes muddy. So the men of No.4, including my dad, got together to dig out then lay a concrete path all between the 4 poles. All self help. Glasgow Corporation not involved at all!"

If you would like to share your memories with the project and/or volunteer then please either message the page or email us at GScollective@outlook.com. There will be professional oral history interview skills training on Saturday the 14th of June in Glasgow City Centre. Spaces are limited. There are also opportunities to volunteer to write and create art for the project website which will go live in 2026. We are looking forward to hearing from you!

22/04/2025

If you would like to be interviewed for this exciting new oral history project and/or volunteer on it ( do the interview skills training and/ or write a piece for the website or do artwork) then please message the page or email GSCollective@outlook.com. Looking forward to hearing from you!

“Marmite Housing” – Glasgow’s Post-war Housing: A People’s History

We are delighted to announce that Glasgow Story Collective (GSC) has received funding to deliver an exciting heritage project that documents the oral history of Glasgow’s post-war housing programmes. This multi-faceted project will offer opportunities for former and current residents to record their memories of Glasgow’s older housing stock and their experiences of living in extensive housing schemes and high-rise tower blocks. We also want to explore how the schemes changed and grew over time.

The project is funded by The National Lottery Heritage Fund with additional support from Communities Past & Futures Society.
GSC will recruit local volunteers from diverse backgrounds to work with the project, including jobseekers, young carers and people with disabilities, who are often unable to access a career in the heritage sector, and people with an interest in history. Volunteers will receive training and be supported to work with GSC and its heritage experts to research the history and record testimonies.
The project will create a unique digital oral history archive of interviews that will be presented as an open collection on the project website; trained volunteers will continue to add more recorded interviews to that collection over time.

Jennifer Morrison, Chair of Glasgow Story Collective says:
“Some older residents recall living in ‘wonderful tenements’, with high ceilings and gloriously tiled stairways, fantastic neighbours and close-knit communities; others talk about slum dwellings no longer fit for habitation, which had poor sanitation, communal toilets, and outdoor plumbing. They all talk about being moved away from relatives and friends to new housing developments, including modern high-rise flats and schemes, though these appear to have been either loved or loathed by occupants, hence our project title, ‘Marmite Housing’. Whilst these ‘shiny’ new developments were modern and spacious compared to earlier working-class housing stock, they often lacked basic local amenities, such as shops, community spaces, and regular, affordable transport links. Many of those new ‘schemes’ later became notorious for having poor quality housing and dampness, high unemployment, crime, and notorious gang culture and violence; residents have since worked hard to regenerate their neighbourhoods. This project will reveal and preserve all of those lived-experiences, good and bad, happy and sad, and probably much more.”

We are deeply grateful to The National Lottery Heritage Fund and National Lottery players for their financial support, and to the many groups and individuals who are and will support the project as it progresses.

If you would like to record your lived-experiences or volunteer with the project, please message us or email: GSCollective@outlook.com

Notes:
GSC is a volunteer-led community interest group that trains and works with local volunteers, including disadvantaged and marginalised individuals and groups, the elderly, young people, and people who have a bit of spare time and want to get involved with local projects, and to provide them with opportunities to support local projects or gain work experience in community and heritage sectors to which they would not otherwise have access. GSC has egalitarian and inclusive values and is not affiliated to any political party.

03/04/2025