My interest in social history really began with listening to the stories of my parents’ lives as children in London during the Second World War. Stories of life playing in the ruins of the bombed out East End captured my fascination with the experience of the past and I have retained this ever since. Their stores shaped my interest in working-class history while at university. They shaped my choice as a PhD student to explore the history of working-class life and politics in suburban London. They continue to shape my faith that the study of history, at its best, is much more than an exercise in academic objectivity, but owes a duty to recover and to tell those tales of everyday life and experience that are constantly being lost. This is an old-fashioned credo, but I don’t care.

My own work as a historian has circulated hesitantly around the question of how nature and society relate. I am very interested in how nature was encountered and experienced in everyday contexts, especially during the twentieth century. This is a vast issue to try to encompass, but one that will only matter more as we move into an era of catastrophic global warming and mass extinction. How did environmental change impact the social world? Why did the problems of the ‘environment’ often appear to have no purchase on everyday lives? What do these things suggest about ‘what is to be done’? These are questions that will increasingly matter in coming decades, and to which social history can offer answers.

Sharing knowledge should be a key part of social history practice wherever it takes place. Over the last decade I have greatly enjoyed teaching courses on ‘people’s history’ and the history of everyday life in Cornwall. It is fascinating to see how the tradition of ‘history-from-below’ still excites students tired of ‘national’ and intellectual histories that seem so distant from their experience. I always start with the history of my own family and find many excited to discover that they too might have the right to a place in the story of the past. It is perhaps a sign of how far ‘official’ history has departed from the hidden histories of ordinary people that something so simple still has the power to delight. In this sense, then. I believe that social history, in all its rich diversity of practice, still matters.