Mass Observation

Mass-Observation was a United Kingdom social research organisation founded in 1937. Their work ended in the mid-1960s but was revived in 1981. The Archive is housed at the University of Sussex.

Mass-Observation aimed to record everyday life in Britain through a panel of around 500 untrained volunteer observers who either maintained diaries or replied to open-ended questionnaires (known as directives). They also paid investigators to anonymously record people's conversation and behaviour at work, on the street and at various public occasions including public meetings and sporting and religious events.

The creators of the Mass-Observation project were anthropologist Tom Harrisson, poet Charles Madge and filmmaker Humphrey Jennings. Collaborators included the critic William Empson, the photographer Humphrey Spender, the collagist Julian Trevelyan, the novelist G.B. Edwards, the later famous spiritualist medium Rosemary Brown, and the painters William Coldstream and Graham Bell. Run on a shoestring budget with money from their own pockets and the occasional philanthropic contribution or book advance, the project relied most on its network of volunteer correspondents.

Harrisson had set up his base in a working-class street in the northern English industrial town of Bolton (known in M-O publications as "Worktown"), in order with his collaborators to "systematically... record human activity in this industrial town" (Madge & Harrisson, 1938:7) using a variety of observational methods. Meanwhile, Madge from his London home had started to form a group of fellow-poets, artists and film-makers under the name "Mass-Observation". The two teams began their collaboration in early 1937.

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