We spoke to Dr Lisa Mckenzie, who’s working with us as Curator of The People’s Museum of Ashfield, a brand new temporary exhibition celebrating the past, present and future of Ashfield launching in Spring 2027. She tells us why projects like this are so important and exciting.
Growing up on the Carsic Estate in Sutton-in-Ashfield in the 1970s and 80s, I did not really think that arts, culture or museums were meant for people like me. They felt distant, a bit posh, and somehow out of reach. Museums, as I imagined them then, were places full of wall hangings and portraits of kings, queens and landed gentry – stories about the people who owned land, not the people who lived and worked on it.
But looking back, I can see that arts and culture were all around us. They just were not always called that. In the Northern Soul music and dances I grew up with, and in the way working-class industrial communities took American soul music and made it their own. They were in the clothes women made for a night out from a yard of material bought at the market, and in the toys carved from wood or go-carts welded together by men using the skills they had honed in factories or down the pit.
Our working men’s clubs and miners’ welfares were full of music, comedy and storytelling. People told stories with humour, with pride, with sadness, and with that particular Ashfield way of making sense of the world. Those places held culture. Our homes held culture. Our streets held culture. We just were not always taught to recognise it as something that belonged in a museum.
That is why the idea of The People’s Museum of Ashfield matters to me. It is not about creating a museum that speaks down to people or tells them what is important. It is about creating something of our own – a place shaped by the objects, memories, skills and lived experiences of the people who know Ashfield because they are part of it.
Ashfield Creates, Nonsuch Studios and I are working together to bring that idea to life. The People’s Museum of Ashfield will be made with the wider community, through the things people choose to share: an object kept in a drawer, a photograph, a song, a memory, a story passed down, a skill learned at work or at home. Together, those contributions can build a picture of where we have come from, but also where we might go next.
For me, this museum has to carry the colour, humour, laughter and sadness that make Ashfield, Ashfield. It has to make room for working-class life not as a footnote to someone else’s history, but as the history itself. It has to recognise that creativity has always been here — in how people dressed, danced, fixed things, made things, entertained each other and told the truth about their lives.
The people of Ashfield have always been brilliant at telling stories. Through those stories we understand who we are, what has shaped us, what we have survived and what we still want to become. The People’s Museum of Ashfield is a chance to bring those stories together and to say clearly that they matter.
This will be our museum: made by us, shaped by us and filled with the lives, memories and creativity of our communities.
Lisa (right) and friend, growing up in in Ashfield in the 80s
Inspired by Lisa’s words? Then be sure to register your interest here
ABOUT LISA
Dr Lisa Mckenzie grew up on the Carsic Estate and attended Carsic Primary school and then Quarrydale Comprehensive. Leaving school in 1984 she went to work at the Pretty Polly factory. Since then returned to Education at the University of Nottingham and gained a Phd in Sociology and Social Policy. Lisa today is committed to telling the stories of the working class through community projects and recently co- written a play about growing up on the Carsic Estate in Sutton-in-Ashfield.
Dr Lisa Mckenzie today
Get involved with the museum here
