Dissertation Title
Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies MA Cultural Memory Dissertation Supervisor: Dr Eleanor Chiari In Living Memory: How Does an Oral History Collection Map the Landscape of Greenham and Crookham Common ? Catriona H. Jardine Brown 10th September 2009 Contents Page Prologue 4 Introduction 5 Section One: Inside 11 Section Two: Outside 20 Section Three: Inside Out 28 Conclusion 35 Appendix 38 Bibliography 39 - 2 - “A place is particular, a tapestry of woven contexts: enduring and ephemeral, local and global, related and unrelated, now and then, past and future… Every place has ongoing stories, recognized, concealed, and lost. Some take longer to tell than others, some are short; some have an ending, others are open, still unfolding”(Whiston Spirn 1998: 160). - 3 - Prologue When we are unfamiliar with a place, we can turn to maps to guide us and so before I began talking to the local inhabitants about Greenham and Crookham Common, I consulted a map of West Berkshire to give me a sense of the space involved. Its aerial perspective revealed a piece of common land lying south-east of the market town of Newbury, just north of the county boundary with Hampshire demarcated by the river Enborne running along its bottom edge and with the Kennet and Avon Canal sitting a bit further to its north. Aware that other people‟s memories of the area might precede the publication date of my map, I particularly noted the details that were most likely to have been long-standing features in the landscape. However, it became clear early on in my discussions with those who knew the Common well, that they remembered the place differently.
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