with Dr Pete Edwards. Proper Northern History.

First broadcast 17 June 2021

My guest this week is the historian Dr Peter Edwards. From a Polish-Welsh background, Pete was born in Liverpool and grew up in Birmingham. He studied history at the university of Leeds, where he also completed his PhD research.

Pete is a brilliant teacher and has taught in a real variety of settings. These include: a secondary school in Liverpool, Wakefield College, a drop-in centre for homeless people, Greenhead Sixth form college in Huddersfield, and Wakefield Prison. At the latter, he set up the education provision on the Close Supervision Centre for the most dangerous offenders in the High Security estate.

Pete currently works in admissions at the University of Leeds Doctoral College, but the role he had just before that is the role he’s here to talk about today – and it’s also his unfinished project. Pete took voluntary severance pay to leave Greenhead College in 2015, using the funds to establish his very own company, called Roundhouse History Tours. In the process he became one of less than 100 badged guides in the International Guild of Battlefield Guides.

As you’ll hear in our conversation, Pete’s history tours took clients to an array of fascinating sites, from the European continent to Wales and northern England.

I’m in the extremely fortunate position of having had Pete as my A-level history teacher. He’s one of those special teachers who stays with you forever. You’ll be able to see why when you hear the flair and enthusiasm that he has for his subject. (And when you hear the reassurance he’s able to convey even when talking about less than uplifting topics…)

Pete tells me about the sights he takes clients to, all of which have incredibly rich and surprising layers of history; he tells me about the alternative histories he develops for his groups, and we talk about why historians should go outside more.