Problematising and Practising ‘Community-Focused’ Local History: On the Ermine, A Council Estate in Lincoln in the 1950s and 1960s

The Ermine is a large housing estate in Lincoln built by the local authorities in the 1950s. This article reports on investigations of the history of the estate carried out since 2008. 1 The account draws upon a summary of progress that was presented to ‘Researching and Writing Local Histories of the Twentieth Century’, a combined conference of the British Association for Local History and the Society for Lincolnshire History and Archaeology in 2010. The conference paper explored a relatively uncharted aspect of the history of Lincoln, the story of the Ermine, as well as made reference to a wider historiographical context concerning the development of local history and approaches to the local historical study of the twentieth century. This article, developing upon the conference paper, brings together a number of lines of enquiry opened up by the case-study explorations on the Ermine.