We are delighted to say that our 2025 SHS Conference was an immense success!

This was the first time we have ever hosted a conference in a heritage site: namely, the Black Country Living Museum in Dudley. It made for a fabulously evocative and exciting venue. It’s also safe to say that social historians clearly quite like a good fairground ride, with a 130-year-old merry-go-round featuring heavily in pictures of both our committee and speakers…

The heart of the conference remained, as every year, it’s speakers and attendees. We had 52 panels featuring papers from 155 speakers, presenting on an incredibly wide range of topics in social and cultural history. Overall,  we had 193 attendees over the three days of the conference, making for a really vibrant and bustling environment for people to present their research.

We were also thrilled to host two fantastic conference-wide speaker events. On the first day, we were delighted to host a Roundtable on ‘Material Culture’, featuring Dr Simon Briercliffe (Black Country Living Museum), Professor Tim Hitchcock (University of Sussex), Dr Ana Howie (Cornell University) and Professor Simon Morgan (Leeds Beckett University). Key issues emerged – how should we approach the study of objects? What can it add to existing historical narratives? It was great to hear from a range of disciplinary perspectives, from historians of art and those working in the museums sector, to experts in the digital humanities and the history of politics.

On the second day of the conference, we were thrilled to hear from Professor Karen Harvey, who gave our keynote. Her talk, ‘‘“Such trifling things”: Writing about Nothing in the eighteenth century’, explored how and why eighteenth-century writers ‘belittled’ their letters, and the ways in which this was shaped by both gender and class. Rather than being trivial or unimportant, Harvey revealed how ‘chat’ and discussion of the everyday underpinned human relationships, and was a profound form of communication and connection. The letters used for this research have been collected and analysed through Harvey’s ‘Social Bodies‘ project, which has become an important source of primary material for many of our members.

Aside from the fairground, we also enjoyed a range of other activities. Many of our attendees loved exploring the site and chatting to the amazing, in-character staff who taught us much about the experience of living in the Black Country in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And when we say ‘in-character’ we really mean it – one man got around the town via a rather spectacular (if terrifying) penny farthing bicycle! The Pub Quiz, run by our fabulous PGR reps Amy Stanning and Louise Bell, was also a great success, with standing room only by the time all keen quizzers had descended on the Elephant and Castle Pub.

We are really grateful to everyone who made this year’s conference a great success, including our strand convenors, as well as our committee, with our Administrative Secretary Jenni Hyde and Honorary Secretary Henry Irving helping to make sure everything ran smoothly. We are also very thankful to Simon Briercliffe and all of the team at BCLM who made our conference one to remember!