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This paper offers some reflections on two community history projects run by the Department of History and Welsh History at Aberystwyth University and funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund:  Aberystwyth at War 1914-1919: Experience, Impact, Legacy (2018-19), and People’s Voices in a People’s War: Aberystwyth 1939-45 (2020-22).  It addresses the ways in which the two projects engaged with the local community, and presents some of their key insigths, findings and outputs.  In particular it considers the challenges that each project faced in addressing widespread local assumptions about how the two wars in their different ways impacted on the town, and the ways in which those challenges were negotiated.

Siân Nicholas is Professor Emerita in modern British history at Aberystwyth University.  She is the author of The Echo of War: Home Front Propaganda and the Wartime BBC, has published widely on the history of the BBC, and the inter-war and wartime mass media, and is currently completing a major co-authored monograph on the history of the British press in the Second World War.  She was a founding director of the Aberystwyth Centre for Media History and is a former editor of the journal Twentieth Century British History.  She has led two NLHF-funded community projects on the impact of the world wars on Aberystwyth and its local area, and is currently running a WW2 allotment and a medieval physic garden project on the Aberystwyth University campus.