The project

Migration Stories NW (2021-24) is a National Lottery Heritage Fund project documenting histories of migration in and out of the North West of England from the Roman period to the present day.

The project is coordinated by Global Link in Lancaster in partnership with four other North West partners: Cheshire Global Learning, Crossing Footprints in Manchester, Cumbria Development Education Centre and Liverpool World Centre. We are supported by historians, archives, museums and libraries from across the region.

In the first year of the project, each partner has worked with a local group of adult research volunteers to gather around 60 individual histories of women, men and children who have migrated in and out of the North West. These histories feature on our interactive Migration Stories page, launched in December 2022.

During the second stage of the project the stories are being used as a stimulus for workshops with young people and as the focus of a new teacher resource exploring the connections between historical and contemporary migration.

Young people are gathering oral histories of recent migrants to the North West to be added to the map. We will also produce films and a touring pop-up exhibition that will visit each of the partner locations to share our stories with the wider public.

In this time of increasingly negative attitudes towards asylum seekers and ‘illegal’ entrants to the UK, Migration Stories NW shows how migration is a normal part of human existence that has shaped the social landscape of our region for centuries.