Bringing the Survey home: adventures in community engagement

Baker, John; Carroll, Jayne; Kilby, Susan

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to celebrate the long-standing partnership between the Survey of English Place-Names and local communities, to recognise the great debt the Survey owes for the work of volunteers over the last hundred years, and to reflect upon the different forms that collaboration has taken and how it continues to evolve as the Survey progresses. By the end of the paper, we hope to have underlined the ongoing importance of community engagement and explored some of the ways in which it contributes to the work of the Survey; perhaps most importantly, the potential for community engagement to continue to lead the Survey in new and exciting directions.

The paper begins with a brief outline of the role of local communities and volunteers over the last hundred years, before examining the Place-Names of Shropshire project as an example of the extent to which community engagement is now an embedded element of publicly-funded research projects. Finally, we introduce some of the most recent community engagement work to come out of the Shropshire project.

Citation

Baker, J., Carroll, J., & Kilby, S. (2025). Bringing the Survey home: adventures in community engagement. Journal of the English Place‑Name Society, 55,

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Nov 27, 2024
• Online Publication Date: Jan 20, 2026
• Publication Date: Jan 20, 2025
• Deposit Date: Jan 17, 2025
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 21, 2026
• Journal: Journal of the English Place-Name Society
• Print ISSN: 1351-3095
• Publisher: English Place-Name Society
• Peer Reviewed: Not Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 55
• Keywords: English Place-Names
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/44232797
• Publisher URL: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/epns/journal.aspx