Juliet Gardiner

A series of five lectures to celebrate Mass Observation's 75th anniversary begins this month with a talk by social historian and best-selling author Juliet Gardiner.

In 'Writing the mid century with Mass Observation', to be held in the Fulton Lecture Theatre on Wednesday 12 October (6.30pm), Juliet will be exploring the intention behind what has become one of the most fascinating repositories of information about the lives of ordinary people.

Juliet, whose recent books include The Thirties: An intimate history (2010) and The Blitz: The British under attack (2010), first used the archives in the 1980s to research the Home Front.

She was fascinated by the project begun by Charles Madge, Humphrey Jennings and Tom Harrisson. Their intense curiosity about the mass of people - and more than 70 per cent of the population were working class when Mo was started - led to the unique documentation of people's lifestyles, from how long they took to drink a pint of beer to what they had on their mantelpieces.

"What interests me is how this anthropological material would be used," she says. "Several books were published and more were planned, but did the Mass-Observers hope that their findings might influence government policy? Or was there a danger that with so much and such disparate material, it might end up in shoeboxes?

"Could they have had any idea how invaluable the material they were gathering would be to future historians?"

Juliet, who has appeared on and been the consultant for numerous television programmes, including the adaptation of Ian McEwan's novel Atonement and BBC One's 'Turn Back Time, The High Street', found the archive invaluable for the five books she has written about the Home Front.

"This was when the archive really came into its own," she says. "Ordinary people were given a voice. As a historian it is always a challenge how much you can generalise from the particular. Mass Observation is brilliant in how it helps to do that, in how you can get the mood of the country."

And she is pleased to see that the appetite for uncovering social history continues, not just with MO but through the multitude of television programmes looking at everything from home movies to parish records. "Television has become much better at sourcing materials - and at presenting these sources in an original way."

The next lecture in the series will be given by Sussex author Virginia Nicholson on 8 December. Her book, Millions Like Us: Women's lives in war and peace 1939-1949 tracked the hopes and fears of Mass Observation diarists during the war years. In her lecture she will explain how the archive enabled her to "eavesdrop" on the innermost thoughts of such ordinary women.

The archive is a charitable trust in the care of the University of Sussex and is housed in the Library. More information about the lecture series and Mass Observation