By Nicola Spurling and Elizabeth Shove
‘If The Walls Could Talk’ was a public engagement initiative which I ran as part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science in 2014. I produced two picture books conveying ideas and findings from research in the New Towns Archive (in Hertford) and the Stevenage Museum in which I conducted archive research and oral history interviews to look at the relationship between shifting standards of house design, and escalating everyday consumption of energy and mobility since the 1950s. The Books were sent to local primary schools for use in sustainability education, and I also used them in a workshop for the public at the Stevenage Museum.
Nicola Spurling 