The Workhouse by Simon Fowler is a well-researched, fascinating (though somewhat grim) account of life in Britain's workhouses. Simon Fowler is a success because of being blessed with a wondrous voice. He writes stunning songs. And he tells a damn good yarn. They are three critical elements that make this book.’ DANIEL RACHEL In The Silence of the Archive , David Thomas , Simon Fowler and Valerie Johnson challenge the imagined notion of the archive as a comprehensive repository by exploring their silences, gaps and elisions. While the book could do more to draw out its hopeful implications, this is a timely and valuable call for a new relationship between archivists, archival subjects and archive users, writes Peter Webster . Nonetheless, The Silence of the Archive is throughout a call for a new relationship between archivists, the ‘archival subjects’ (those whose lives are documented) and those who use the archived record. Johnson writes of the process whereby those archival subjects are engaged in the process of creating the archive of their existence, thus becoming co-creators with the archivist (149-53). Thomas points out the acute need in a digital archive for close engagement with end users, both in the selection of material and in the design of the interfaces that make those records first discoverable and then usable (70-72). It is a shame, then, that this call for change – necessary and urgent – is somewhat muted here; indeed, in general, the authors have a tendency to quote and expound the work of others rather than elaborate an argument, and could have been bolder. However, it is a case that should be widely heard. Records managers, archivists, historians and other users of archives should read this timely and important book. Collaborating with his lifelong friend, award-winning and bestselling author, Daniel Rachel, One For The Road is presented as an extended conversation and arranged alphabetically to provide a kaleidoscope rather than chronological account. The result is a revelatory self-portrait and a testimony to friendship.

At much the same time, the transition from paper to digital in records management and archiving has presented the profession with challenges of exceptional scale and complexity, as laid out by David Thomas, former Director of Technology at the National Archives of the UK, in Chapter Three of this fascinating book. This transformation has fundamentally changed the ways in which live records are created and managed by organisations, with the significant added risk of mis-description as frontline staff are pressed into becoming their own archivists, and also of discontinuity in working IT systems such that data is lost or rendered uninterpretable. As these records pass to the archive, new and intractable challenges of scale come into play as archivists must select content for archiving and appraise it, presenting the difficulty of finding effective ways of describing these records and designing access systems that meet the needs of users.This is an intriguing book for any Nonfiction reader. Heartbreaking, of course. These were real people. Some reformers and advocates really did want to help...in the right way...but most viewed the poor as an illness or something to be avoided and they suffered as a consequence. To find out more about ONE FOR THE ROAD and receive up to the minute news on the book and special offers, visit www.facebook.com/OFTRbook Collaborating with his lifelong friend, award-winning author, Daniel Rachel, One For The Road is presented as an extended conversation featuring 69 personally hand-selected songs by Simon, including never seen before original handwritten lyrics, 13 unreleased songs, and over 350 hand chosen photographs and rarely seen items of memorabilia. This new stunning book offers a unique and illuminating visual record of one of the great songwriters.

Taking off from my recent reading of the Great Britain's Edwardian era and the current housing situation in urban areas in the United Kingdom, Simon Fowler's "Workhouse" is a fitting accompanying piece to these previous titles. Workhouse initially reads like a thesis--whose passages follow a serious tone and a rigid structure in its first chapter but opens up like a reportage in the next few chapters. Right off the bat, what I liked about the book is that it attempts to erase some significantly whitewashed facts perpetuated during the time period. Fowler provides examples of what life was like behind the doors of the workhouse and he does not pull any punches and gives examples of the various workhouses that covered the country. He explains the hierarchy of the workhouses with the masters and matrons and how they dealt with the people in their care. Fowler also explains how the inmates were treated within the walls and that entering the workhouse was meant to be humiliating and that they would be accepting humiliation on them by the authorities. This may sound platitudinous: something a history student might write in an essay. This chapter, and the next, explore why this has long been the case in the context of traditional, one might say analogue, archives. In this chapter we will consider how archival institutions have traditionally failed to meet the needs of host communities and why there have been great gaps in the collections, and in archival collecting policies. In the words of the great French historian Marc Bloch, the records of a society are ‘witnesses in spite of themselves’ (Bloch, 1953, 51). That is, on the one hand the records become witnesses in the evidentiary sense arising from the process of record making and record keeping and, on the other, also bear witness to the lives of those who are the subjects of the records.

Book contents

In the past two to three decades, the archival profession has been caught between two currents of cultural and technological change: simultaneous, largely unrelated, both apparently inexorable. Largely confined to the academy, but resonating beyond it, has been a radical scepticism about the stability of meaning in language resulting from the postmodern turn in historical thinking. Coupled with this epistemological scepticism has been a hermeneutic of suspicion of the power relations that are embedded in the creation, description and accessing of archival records. This has been bound up with the emergence of a wider politics of identity, and the assertion of the experience of marginalised groups as being equally worthy of documentation and study as those more ‘official’ voices that have traditionally dominated archives. Fowler explores all aspects of the workhouse, including (but not limited to) the working conditions, daily life, and the organisation of the workhouses. There are also images, and inclusions of memoirs and letters by people who lived and worked in workhouses.