ABSTRACT
Historical sentience colours immediate experience. Historical awareness suffuses everyday life. The popular interest in local history brings this out. Unsurprisingly, it proves to be a heterogenous mix of mental representations:
The old cotton mill, the humped back bridge across the canal, the cobbled narrow street between the terraced houses and the site of the coal mine: all are evocative to me. Not a Hovis advertisement, but my impression of some Cheshire outskirts of Manchester where my grandparents grew up and worked between the 1880s and the Great War. This location has a fascination and even mystery denied to other places, including the seemingly mundane area in which I was born. Its magic is in my mind linked to a past I can never know at first hand; but it is part of a past I can try to retrieve while some still have memories of it from a few years later or by searching such records as have survived.
