I am studying a small neighbourhood of nineteenth-century Wolverhampton known as Carribee Island. This district (near today’s Stafford Street and Broad Street) was a highly-populated and extremely poor part of this industrial town, as well as being home to a significant proportion of Wolverhampton’s large Irish community.
My research draws on my background as a geographer by analysing the use and production of space within such an area. I will combine more traditional social historical sources with GIS software and digital techniques to reconstruct and analyse the neighbourhood, its physical and social environments. I have an interest not only in spatial history but also in the creative and public presentations of history and in the idea of history from below, and hope to use this research to give some voice to a population typically only seen from the outside.