About

Migration Stories NW (2021-24) is a National Lottery Heritage Fund project documenting individual histories of migration in the North West of England from the Roman period to the present day.

The project is coordinated by Global Link in Lancaster and involves four other North West partners: Cheshire Global Learning, Crossing Footprints in Manchester, Cumbria Development Education Centre and Liverpool World Centre. We are supported by historians, archives, museums, libraries and schools from across the region and beyond. See a list of who we have worked with here.

In the first year of the project, each partner worked with a local group of adult volunteers to research and document individual histories of women, men and children who migrated into or out from the North West from the Roman era until the middle of the twentieth century. These histories feature on our interactive migration map, launched in December 2022.

During the second stage of the project we shared the stories we had gathered with young people in schools as a stimulus to think and learn more about historical and contemporary migration. We then trained the young people in oral history skills so they could interview recent migrants to or from our region. These edited interviews have been added as digital (video) stories to the online map.

In the final year of the project the partners used the 100 or so stories gathered during this project to develop a learning resource for schools about migration. We have also produced films and a touring pop-up exhibition that is visiting each of the partner locations to share our stories with the wider public.

In this time of increasingly negative attitudes towards asylum seekers and ‘illegal’ entrants to the UK, Migration Stories NW shows how migration is a normal part of human existence that has shaped the social landscape of our region for centuries.

The Migration Stories NW project team at our kick-off meeting in November 2021