Kempsey voices

Welcome to Kempsey Voices, the Kempsey Oral History Project, a community initiative dedicated to documenting and preserving the rich history and unique experiences of those who have lived through the significant changes to the village and its daily life. The project is based on recorded interviews with residents to build up a recent history of the village and contribute to its sense of community. 

Kempsey, is a rural village in south Worcestershire, in the lee of the Malvern Hills and, perhaps now, in danger of being absorbed into Worcester as a suburb.  It has undergone a "massive amount of growth and change" in living memory. These changes have many aspects and include radical changes in lifestyle and personal circumstances as well as to the geography. This, of course, reflects what has been taking place on a national scale. 

The interviews collectively provide a rich portrait of Kempsey's past, highlighting its character as a close-knit, agricultural settlement that navigated the challenges of expansion and has transformed into a much larger, modern community. The following pages contain extracts from the interviews reflecting aspects of life through these changes.

The project has so far interviewed current residents who have given us a range of memories going back as far as the Second World War. Recordings of the interviews will be archived at the Worcestershire Archive and Archaeology Service but clips of them and quotes are reproduced on this site in the pages that follow.