Dr Joseph Owen is a senior researcher on the AHRC And Towns projects, a specialist policy officer for Public Policy | Southampton and the Southampton Institute for Arts and Humanities and a critic of modernist and film studies.
In this blog he recounts a project on housing, heritage and identity that he led in collaboration with the housing association Abri in Mansbridge in Southampton. The work, he suggests, explored poetry as a form of social infrastructure.
Poetic social infrastructure: Foregrounding relational, everyday heritage through poetry
Heritage practitioners have turned to poets as interlocutors capable of articulating people’s feelings about their historic environment. English Heritage, for example, used poetry in its Untold Stories programme, launched in 2020, as it sought to ‘explore the hidden histories and contemporary resonances’ of its abbeys, castles, chapels, and Cold War bunkers.
The digital anthology that followed captures evocatively the act of ‘pitching back through time while interrogating and even refuting reverberations of the past within a living present’. Here, poetry demonstrates an essential temporal affect. ‘Time folds and becomes toric, mistaking | millions of years for a few short seconds’, Gregory Kearns writes in his ode to Goodshaw Chapel.
Yet heritage risks being reductively conceived if it encompasses only the built and physical environment, even when imbued with the possibilities afforded by a poetic architecture. It is here that poetry’s relevance becomes apparent.
The Mansbridge Heritage Project was interested in the role of poetry in evoking people’s relational, everyday relationship to heritage. The project was a collaboration between Southampton Institute for Arts and Humanities and Abri housing association. It sought to capture what residents feel, understand, and experience about Mansbridge, a suburb of Southampton known for its generous green spaces, striking layout, and distinctive style of housing.
In Mansbridge, we found that tensions surfaced when authorised local heritage narratives—about the estate architect Herbert Collins, the once-dominant Ford factory, the housing association—encountered residents’ personal stories and collective mythologies. We used a mixed-methods approach to gain a better understanding of how these narratives, stories, and mythologies intersected.
Poetry, as both a written and verbal practice, uncovered otherwise subterranean and dissonant feelings about the nature of place and community. It elicited word-of-mouth anecdotes purporting the existence of carp fishing and secret tunnels, which fused with private memories of bonfires and conker fights. Together, these accounts forged a web of individual experiences among a public expression of community, one which both incorporated and exceeded other mandated histories.
The very origins of the social housing estate were affirmed and recast. Participants devised an acrostic poem based on the word Mansbridge. A participant proposed the one-word line, ‘Inspiration’, for ‘I’ because they considered ‘the project of Mansbridge’ to be a source of shared pride whose underlying social history granted it an important and distinctive character.
At the local primary school, pupils imagined Mansbridge through a phonetic engagement with poetry. Using the poetic voice to speak aloud the past and future of Mansbridge had a powerful effect: it made more comprehensible the generations of family life that had existed in the same setting. In these ways, poetic practice was itself a form of social infrastructure, and the workshops acted as engagement tools and analytical devices that surfaced latent relationships.
Mansbridge, while distinctive, is not an exception: it simply reveals a broader dynamic between poetry, place, and heritage. Poetic practice gave space for communities to recognise who they once were, and, suggestively, it allowed them to conceive themselves as historically and socially entangled in the present tense.
