In this blog, Dr Mike Esbester, senior lecturer in history at Portsmouth, discusses your chance to get involved in the research project he co-leads, looking at safety and accidents on British and Irish railways at the start of the 20th century. Mike’s research and teaching focus on the everyday, including ideas about mobility and accidents […]
Author Archive | Mike Esbester
Health and Safety in Contemporary Britain
New Publications | Dr Mike Esbester, Senior Lecturer in History, has just published a book with Professor Paul Almond on Health and Safety in Contemporary Britain: Society, Legitimacy and Change since 1960. The book charts the development of modern British health and safety, in response to ideas around risk society, managerialism, regulatory capitalism, and demographic […]
Looking backwards – and forwards
In this post, Mike Esbester, Senior Lecturer in History, outlines student and staff work with an external partner to mark a significant anniversary. Mike’s research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain, particularly on the cultural history of safety, risk and accident prevention, and on the history of mobility. When people hit a big milestone age […]
History & practice – images of wellbeing
In this post, Mike Esbester discusses how his research into the history of communicating health and safety messages is linked to a current initiative to promote wellbeing and better awareness of mental health at work and beyond. ‘History is more or less bunk’. So Henry Ford claimed – rather unfairly, I would suggest. There’s a […]
(Un)safe heritage?
In this post, the third in our series of blogs looking at sites of historical interest in Portsmouth, Mike Esbester, Senior Lecturer in History at Portsmouth, explores what might be learnt from an apparently unexceptional piece of the city’s built environment. Mike’s research and teaching focus on the everyday, including ideas about mobility and accidents […]
If you go down to the Archives today …
In this post, Mike Esbester brings us up to date on the book he wrote earlier in the year, marking the 60th anniversary of the British Safety Council – now picked up by The National Archives and health and safety professionals. 2017 marks the 60th anniversary of the British Safety Council, one of the leading […]