Bill Laws

In 1989 storyteller Lenni Alsop and I started an oral history project in Herefordshire. It was a good time to launch such a venture: Lenni and I were both broke; there were other interesting start-ups in the pipeline like Rural Media, the Hereford Photography Festival, a fringe Three Choirs, an ‘alternative’ magazine The Archenfield Chronicle, and the community movies project Reels on Wheels. Lenni was still broke when he died, dear fellow, and I’m still not loaded. But the project continued – it’ll be 35 this year.

In February 1991 I travelled around France camping out in our VW and researching Traditional Houses of Rural France, focusing on the vernacular architecture of Brittany, Normandy, Burgundy, Dordogne, Provence and Pays Basque. (Someone told me once” ‘when I feel a bit down I pick up that book to cheer me up’) How strange to think it was less than fifty years since these leaflets were circulating through Vichy France.