Local History Writers Editing and Proofreading Services

You are writing about a place where the readers live. The man who ran the garage in 1974 has a daughter on the parish council. The factory closure has three versions, and the people who hold all three will buy the book. Local history is the only kind of history whose subjects turn up at the launch, and that changes what the writing has to do.

We work on what local historians write — village, town and parish histories, building and site histories, industry and workplace studies, war memorial and roll of honour research, church, chapel and school histories, society journal articles and newsletters, heritage trail and interpretation panel text, oral history transcripts and their editing, exhibition and display captions, funding applications to heritage bodies, and the corrections and second editions that follow. Our editors work on the passages about people whose families are still there.

Writing about the recent past in a small place is where local history is either trusted or resented, and the difficulties are all matters of attribution and register. We work through these so any claim about a named person is sourced in the text, since "according to the minute book of 14 March 1974" is unarguable and "it was widely felt at the time" is an accusation with nobody behind it; so recollections are attributed to the person who gave them, with the date they gave them, because a memory recorded in 2019 about 1974 is a specific and honest kind of evidence and an unattributed one is gossip in a hardback; so disputed episodes are set out as disputed, with each version and who holds it, given that a book choosing a side quietly will be read as taking that side loudly; so living people are described by what is documented rather than by what everyone knows; so the tone stays even where the subject is a grievance the town still has, as heat in the prose transfers the reader's attention from the events to the author; and so the corrections mechanism is stated at the front, since somebody will write to you and being visibly willing to be corrected is what earns a local book its authority. Histories written this way are the ones the library keeps.

Everything you send us stays confidential, including manuscripts, oral history recordings and material about living people. We are editors rather than historians or legal advisers, and we offer no view on your sources, your conclusions or what is safe to publish. What we can do is make the attribution carry the weight the community will put on it.