About

With residents of Peterborough as its focus, Places for All? explores the multiple and diverse place attachments and work and migration histories of people of all ethnic backgrounds, from people born in the city to those who arrived very recently.

It turns on its head narratives that posit long-settled ethnic majority communities as 'indigenous' and understandably resentful of the presence of ethnic minorities and the arrival of international migrants.

Oral history and residential fieldwork are at the heart of the work, which draws on the stories of over one hundred people.

Transcripts from life history interviews are being prepared for deposit in the city archives; research participants and other residents have been involved with the production of film, theatre and photography that has engaged non-traditional arts audiences at locations including an historic Sunni mosque, Peterborough United Football Club stadium, a weekly car boot sale, an Anglican church, and a community allotment initiative.

Collaborating closely with Peterborough-based grass-roots organisations, individual artists and community activists, the project has explored some of the possibilities of working across boundaries of belonging to particular neighbourhoods, ethnic and faith groups. Taken as a whole it offers critical analysis of how contemporary capitalism sustains and exacerbates class inequalities. At a time of massive spending cuts, including cuts to welfare benefits, increasing inequality, and growing workplace precarity, the project thus works against tendencies that seek to divide people experiencing various forms of dispossession.