Knowing my Milton Keynes: how storytelling as intangible cultural heritage can inform the sense of place experienced by residents of the new town of Milton Keynes

This storytelling study explored how applied storytelling interventions, focusing on intangible cultural heritage stories, can precipitate changes in people’s relationships to place using Milton Keynes as a case study. Milton Keynes is a New Town/City urban development often considered to lack heritage beyond its designation in 1967; therefore, engaging resident-participants with local stories provided scope to explore real-world impacts in the practice-based action-research project Knowing My Milton Keynes (KM:MK). Storytelling is a form of intangible cultural heritage and can convey information about the culture and history of a place. This thesis considers how storytelling affects the teller and listener engaged in location-focused stories and argues that stories give a voice to an area that encourages sense of place development and facilitates “re-storying” the image of a place. Developing the work of Ruth Finnegan’s Tales of the City study and to conduct the research, storytelling studies methodological tools were created within a socio-storyology framework exploring voices of place and re-storying to understand the experience participants had of the stories. The research produced a collection of folktales to add to the area's histories, personal narratives, urban myths, and development stories, providing a new collection of intangible cultural heritage stories. In conclusion, it was found that engaging with stories developed a more vital link between participants and Milton Keynes and that extended story engagement increased this process. Whilst voice of place did impact and inform participants through listening to and discussing the area’s stories; it was through searching for and developing one’s own story (in the workshops) that the most significant effect of re-storying occurred. The implications of this study are threefold: Milton Keynes has a new collection of intangible cultural heritage – the folktales; new methodologies for storytelling studies have been developed and may be further developed; although site-specific, the practical methods applied here are adaptable to other areas beyond Milton Keynes.