The second half of the twentieth century witnessed a transformation in the homes, health and wellbeing of British working-class communities. The establishment of the Welfare State and the NHS led to an optimism about the ability of the state to end poverty and ill health, and council houses were constructed on an unprecedented scale, significantly widening access to high-quality housing. Many of these new homes were on large suburban council estates. Yet, in the following decades contemporary commentary about these communities was often critical. There was a concern in the 1950s-60s that suburbanisation had destroyed 'traditional' working-class community networks and caused 'suburban neurosis' amongst lonely housewives, and, from the 1970s, that a collapse in social responsibility had isolated residents through fear of their neighbours. Such sites were repeatedly stigmatised, represented as having low levels of wellbeing and poor access to practical and emotional support from the community. This project examines these changes through co-produced research with residents of the Seacroft estate, Leeds. The small village of Seacroft was massively expanded in the 1950s when construction began on the new council estate. During this project, and in partnership with residents, I will examine how social networks developed, endured and changed in Seacroft from when the estate was first built to the 1990s. In doing so I will reconsider the nature of post-Second World War suburban communities. I will pay attention to complex identities as well as vernacular understandings of class, ethnicity and gender. I will investigate how social networks had a positive or detrimental effect on wellbeing, when support was available within the community and when it was absent. Alongside this, the project will trace changing understandings of mental health and wellbeing in Seacroft, and investigate the role of professional and lay expertise in informing these understandings. The project will develop co-production methods for social historians. I am already working with a women's health discussion group and I will form four more groups to represent a broad range of social groups on the Seacroft estate, many of which rarely have the chance to engage with the university. These groups will be at the core of the project and we will collaboratively develop research questions and aims, analysis and interpretation, and project outputs. We will cross academic/non-academic divides when presenting our research and there will be opportunities for sharing different forms of expertise at conferences and project workshops. A radical reconsideration of ethical practices is at the centre of this project and I will develop new guidelines for participant care and self-care when working on sensitive topics with marginalised groups. There will be a range of outputs aimed at academics, the Seacroft community, and local organisations. I will write articles analysing shifting understandings of and attitudes towards mental health, wellbeing and expertise, and investigating the changing role of friendship and local support networks in wellbeing. In addition, I will write research methodology articles on co-production and ethics which will be of interest to public historians inside and outside the university. A major public output will be produced with and for the Seacroft community, and the form this takes will be decided in collaboration with project participants in response to their needs and wishes. Creative events held throughout the project will disseminate findings as well as generating new research, and the testimony collected will be held in a new archive collection at the West Yorkshire Archives. I will work in partnership with local community and mental health organisations -Chapel FM, Women's Health Matters and the Leeds Older People's Forum - and I will share this research more widely through History & Policy and the What Works Well Centre for Wellbeing.

This research examines the complex changes in sexual identities and communities in the contrasting cities of Leeds, Plymouth, Brighton and Manchester since c.1965. It explores the difference locality makes to the ways sexuality is understood and experienced, and so develops an account of particular 'queer' social, radical, and commercial networks. The research will look at how continuities and disjunctions in these local lives and networks articulated with, but also functioned at a distance from, broader currents and accounts of gay and lesbian life in Britain. It considers the local impact and relative significance of famous LGBT landmarks such as the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, the inception of the Gay Liberation Front in 1970, the AIDS crisis from 1981, the activism around Clause 28 in 1988, and the successive pieces of equalities legislation culminating in the Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Act of 2013. At a detailed and local level, we explore the intersection of sexual, religious, ethnic, class and gender identities and identifications. We will investigate how patterns of local socio-economic growth or decline, of gentrification, of dissent and radicalism, and of migration affected people who identified as gay and lesbian and others who did not but whose sexual, social and community networks overlapped or intersected. In this way we will, firstly, fracture (or 'queer') homogenising general accounts, and, secondly, complicate local community research where identity categories are often the starting point. This will be the first sustained, contextualised and comparative historical investigation of the local impact of changing cultural attitudes and official policies concerning sexuality, and the first to look at the particularities of lesbian, gay or other queer lives in cities with different subcultural associations and reputations. The project reveals the factors which have modulated queer lives and cultures of rejection, toleration or acceptance in these places and elsewhere. It will contribute to debates about the intersection of sexual and other categories of identity and identification, and about conceptions of community, belonging and cultural change. Crucially it will also feed a broader appetite for accounts of the lesbian, gay and queer past and interrogate the individual, community and political implications of that appetite. The project will bridge a gap between 'popular' and 'academic' LGBT or queer histories, and draw attention to local and national resources, archives, community projects and on-line resources - including at least six HLF-funded LGBT community history projects. It will also garner new testimonies relating in particular to the local impact of those projects on ideas of identity and community. The research will be undertaken by two leading academics in the field, together with an experienced postdoctoral researcher. The immediate academic outputs will be: 3 journal articles; a co-authored book, 'Queer North, Queer South', by the PI and Co-I providing comparative analysis of the four core themes (see obj.5) in specific relation to the four cities; a companion volume, 'Out of the Archives' - a contextualized selection of extracts from each of the community history projects, co-edited by the PI, Co-I and PDR; an international conference, 'Provincial Queer Lives'; and papers and panels given by all three researchers at 2 international and 3 UK conferences. Impact activities will include a community archive workshop and witness seminar in each of the case study cities, a comparative History and Archive day, and a History and Policy forum with representatives from community groups, the HLF and linked professionals. A series of special blog dispatches, the project web and Facebook presence, and a Twitter feed will foster further engagement in the research.