Heritage in the home : domestic prehabitation and inheritance

This book explores how people encounter the pasts of their homes, offering insights into the affective, emotional and embodied geographies of domestic heritage. For many people, the intimacy of dwelling is tempered by levels of awareness that their home has been previously occupied by other people whose traces remain in the objects, décor, spaces, stories, memories and atmospheres they leave behind.

This book frames home as a site of historical encounter, knowledge and imagination, exploring how different forms of domestic ‘inheritance’ – material, felt, imagined, known – inform or challenge people’s homemaking practices and feelings of belonging, and how the meanings and experiences of domestic space and dwelling are shaped by residents’ awareness of their home’s history.

The domestic home becomes an important site for heritage work, an intimate space of memories and histories – both our own but also not our own – a place of real and imagined encounters with a range of selves and others. This book will be of interest to academics, students and professionals in the fields of heritage studies, cultural geography, contemporary archaeology, public history, museum studies, sociology and anthropology.