There is a problem that afflicts a great deal of local history writing, and it is not a problem of research or accuracy. The research is often thorough. The facts are correct. The sources are usually properly cited.
The problem the writing.
You read it and you understand, in a general way, what happened. But you cannot see it. You cannot hear it or smell it. You are not there.
Jan Morris could always put you there.
Morris, who died in 2020, aged ninety-four, having produced some forty books on places, people, and history, was one of the finest writers about place that the twentieth century produced. She was not a local historian. But for local historians learning to write, she is one of the most useful models available. Her technique for rendering atmosphere and for making a reader feel the specific weight of a specific place at a specific moment, is something that can be studied, understood, and applied.
Who was Jan Morris?
Morris began her writing career as a journalist: she was the Times correspondent who reported Edmund Hillary’s ascent of Everest in 1953; and retained throughout her life the journalist’s instinct for the telling detail and the readable sentence. Her major works include the Pax Britannica trilogy, a monumental history of the British Empire, and a series of city portraits — Venice, Oxford, Trieste, Hong Kong, Manhattan — that are among the finest travel writing of the century.
She was Welsh by identification, and her late masterpiece A Writer’s World gathers her writing on places across the globe. But it is perhaps her book The Matter of Wales — a meditation on Welsh history, landscape, and identity — that is most directly useful to local historians. It shows how a writer can take a specific place, with all its particular history, and render it so vividly that even a reader who has never been there feels its pull.
How she creates atmosphere
Morris creates atmosphere through accumulation of the specific and the sensory. She does not describe places in general terms. She does not say that a city is beautiful, or ancient, or melancholy. She finds the particular detail that carries those qualities, and she shows it to you.
In her writing on Trieste, for instance, she doesn’t tell you the city feels like a place out of time. Instead, she takes you to a specific café, in a specific street, at a specific hour of the afternoon, and describes what you would see and hear and feel if you were sitting there. The light off the Adriatic. The sound of a particular dialect. The elderly men playing cards in the corner. By the time she steps back to make any kind of general observation, you have already felt what she’s going to say.
This is the technique: concrete specifics first, general observation second. And the specifics must be sensory — not just visual, but auditory, tactile, olfactory. The smells of a place are among its most distinctive and least-recorded characteristics, which means that when a writer captures them, the effect is disproportionately powerful.
What this means for local history writing
Most local historians have access to exactly the kind of material that Morris draws on, if they know how to use it. A Victorian newspaper description of a town’s market day. A photograph of a mill yard in 1895. An oral history recording of an elderly resident remembering a street that no longer exists. A description in a parish magazine of the smell of the tannery that used to stand on the edge of town.
These are atmospheric sources. They carry sensory information that the census and the tithe map cannot provide. The skill (and it is learnable) is to weave them into your writing in the way that Morris weaves her observations: not as decoration, but as evidence. The detail that makes a reader see something is doing historical work, not just literary work.
Here is a practical exercise. Take a scene from your local history research — a specific moment, a specific place — and write two versions of it. In the first, describe what happened, factually and clearly. In the second, try to put the reader physically in the scene. What would they see first? What would they hear? What might they smell? What would the light be doing? Then read both versions and notice the difference.
The risks of the approach
There is a risk in writing atmospheric local history, and it is worth being clear about it. The temptation, once you start thinking in sensory terms, is to invent. To supply details that the record doesn’t support, because the scene feels incomplete without them.
This is the line between history and historical fiction, and local historians must not cross it.
Morris, writing about places she had visited personally, could deploy her own sensory experience. Local historians writing about the past cannot. What you can do is use contemporary descriptions, whether newspaper accounts, diaries, literary sources, or oral histories, to supply the sensory detail, and be explicit about your sources when you do so.
“The Burnley Advertiser of March 1871 described the mill yard as filled with the roar of looms” is history. “The mill yard was noisy” is bland. “The mill yard smelled of oil and damp cotton” is an invention unless you have a source for it. The distinction matters.
A final thought
Morris once wrote that the purpose of good writing about place was to make the reader feel that they have been somewhere they haven’t — or have returned somewhere they have.
That is, when you think about it, precisely what good local history writing should do.
The people who lived in the places you research deserve to be rendered with the same care that Morris brought to Venice or Trieste. Their streets, their markets, their factories, their churches — these were vivid, sensory, specific worlds. The job is to give them back that vividness on the page.
It is harder than it sounds. It is also considerably more satisfying than writing another list of dates.