By Richard Clarkson Pete Slater and myself visited the Leeds Festival of Gothica in May 2026, to give out copies of Volume 1 of our People’s History of Leeds, talk to the attendees and record their Goth stories. The official opening of the Festival was by guest of honour (and one of our previous interviewees) Rosie Garland, who did two poetry readings. As the day went on, we met lots of brilliant people and some of them were kind enough to share their stories. Authentic S

Recently we paid a visit to DECODANCE, an intergenerational dance collective that encourages adults of all ages to move their bodies and enjoy themselves. Meg and Alex run the group and inspire the older members to make short videos for social media, showing off their moves, dressing up in wild costumes and having fun. Alex and Meg were keen for us to meet Mr Chiu, whose life story is fascinating – and who will appear in our Leeds Life section soon. But the group’s enthusiasm

We wanted to link up with the brilliant Playful Anywhere project – and also to get some interview practice for our team – so we pitched up at OPAL to meet some of their older members. The topic was “play”. What games did people play as kids, where did they used to play – and did they have any stories to tell us? Some of the OPAL members were in the 80s and 90s and their childhood was vastly different to the kids of today. As Joyce says, they were “the lucky generation” who ha

After working on our Leeds United chapter, it was an honour to be invited to attend a performance of “Marching On Together” at Leeds Playhouse. The show was about an older Leeds United fan who was living with dementia and found joy and community in supporting the team – it was right up our street. We thought it was a good opportunity to show off our exhibition boards, particularly the story Leeds United’s fateful European cup final in 1975. We spoke to a specially invited aud

The People’s History team were delighted to show off some of our stories at the White Rose Centre recently. We brought our exhibition boards and set them up in the main thoroughfare of the centre. Scores of people stopped to look at the boards and a few were interested enough to come and talk to us. By far the most popular was the Leeds United story about the 1975 European cup final in Paris - it helped that we were situated just outside the LUFC shop. Some fans were content