This website hosts two mental healthcare heritage projects led by Dr Verusca Calabria and supported by a team of researchers at Nottingham Trent University, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
Middle Street Resource Centre: the Heritage of Wellbeing in the Community
2022 marked the 50th year of Middle Street Resource Centre in Beeston, Nottingham. For over half a century, the Centre has been supporting the wellbeing of thousands of local people with enduring mental ill health who are socially excluded from mainstream society.
In 2022 Dr Verusca Calabria was awarded a grant of £98,000 from the National Lottery Heritage Fund to explore and document the rich and hidden history of Middle Street Resource centre. From September 2022 to September 2024, the Centre’s users, their allies, and local residents, including young people, are helping to document and celebrate the Centre’s hidden history using arts and crafts, oral histories, reminiscence, poetry and visual methods, thanks to a grant of £98000 from the National Lottery Heritage Fund. This audio-visual exhibition contains the stories of people who have been part of this project. The project artwork and the poetry were produced by the people who use the Middle Street Resource Centre. The project film documentary was informed by the oral histories, artwork and poetry coproduced for this project in order to tell the story of this project and of Middle Street. A community history booklet was also produced that tells the story of this day centre. If you would like to find out more about the project, submit a message here.
Hidden Memories of Nottingham Mental Healthcare
In the period from June 2020 to February 2021, a team of researchers collected nineteen oral histories from seventeen participants, namely former nurses, social workers, and carers who remembered the transition from mental hospitals to care in the community in the 1990s. Due to COVID-19, the oral histories were collected remotely.
To access the audio-visual exhibition showcasing the oral histories collected for the Hidden Memories project about the hidden history of mental healthcare in Nottingham from the 1960s to the 1990s, please visit the audio-visual exhibition.