A Good Enough Place: Traces of Care, Use, and Everyday Life in Kings Heath: Encounter-Based Montage and Testimony in Place-Based Practice Research

Kings Heath: A Good Enough Place is a practice-research film developed in Kings Heath, Northampton, a neighbourhood shaped by post-war planning, migration, generational change and uneven development. The film investigates how testimony can function within socially engaged and place-based research beyond models that prioritise representation, consensus or deliberation.

Through three independently recorded testimonies situated within the estate's everyday environments, the film explores how people experience, remember and relate to place. Participants do not meet or enter into dialogue. Instead, their voices are placed in relation through editing, juxtaposition and temporal proximity. Memories of a thriving local centre are set against contemporary images of vacant shop units, while personal stories of arrival, attachment and everyday life unfold alongside observations of landscape and the built environment.

The film develops and demonstrates Encounter-Based Montage, a practice research methodology in which editing functions as a site of relation rather than a mechanism for organising or resolving meaning. Meaning emerges through encounters between voices, places and viewers, allowing ambiguity, plurality and difference to remain intact. Rather than presenting testimony as evidence, the film examines how montage can generate new understandings of place through the relationships created between accounts, environments and spectators.

The work contributes to wider research into the role of artistic practice in supporting associational life and collective reflection in communities experiencing social and civic change. It offers an original methodological contribution to participatory film and place-based research through the development of Encounter-Based Montage as a framework for producing and interpreting testimon