The Alderley Sandhills Project: An Archaeology of Community Life in (Post)-Industrial England

Abstract

Despite a great and growing interest in the material culture of modern Britain, few studies shed light on how people consumed and attached meaning to it within domestic settings. Finding a successful methodological approach still proves difficult. Within this field, a particularly noticeable absence is the lack of coverage given to the material worlds of the rural working class. The Alderley Sandhills Project, although primarily archaeological in approach, uses multidisciplinary tools to offer an innovative means of examining how people living in a rural working settlement between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries used and understood the material culture they bought, appropriated and gifted. The Alderley Sandhills Project, which emerged from the Alderley Edge Landscape Project funded by the Leverhulme Trust with support from Cheshire County Council, represents a unique collaboration between the Manchester Museum, the School of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Manchester, English Heritage and the National Trust. The project excavated a small English domestic site to study how the inhabitants responded to industrialization. The excavation focused on a site previously occupied by the Hagg Cottages, which, after being built in the 1740s, were finally demolished in the 1950s. Funded by the Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund, the project compared archival, material and oral sources of evidence.