FOR 40 years, members of the York Oral History Society have been recording the voices of the city's past.

The people whose voices were captured for posterity weren't usually anyone special: just ordinary folk - usually elderly by the time they were recorded - remembering the details of their lives in the city.

They included people who were alive in the late 1800s; those who lived through the First and Second World Wars; people who worked at Terry's and other big York employers; and those who remembered their school days, or the city's music scene in the 1940s, 50s and 60s.

Altogether, the Society holds more than 1,000 recordings which, between them, add up to a unique record of vanished ways of life in York.

As well as the recordings, the society also collected photographs. And it wrote books - lots of them, from 2009's The Story of Terry's to 'Something In The Air, a wonderful account of the music scene in Fifties and Sixties York.

Next week, to celebrate its 40th birthday, the Society will be staging an exhibition in The Hub at 29 Coney Street.

The exhibition will open at 11am next Tuesday (October 11), and as well as featuring presentations and banner displays of old photographs, there will also be listening booths - where you will actually be able to hear voices of people from long ago talking about their day-to-day lives.

Van Wilson, who has been a member of the Society for every one of its 40 years and who has been a writer on many of the books it has published, said oral history was a very special way of capturing the city's past.

"This is the social history of York," she said. "It is ordinary people telling their stories. We didn't go for famous people, just ordinary people talking about their domestic lives, their work, their schooldays.

"The early recordings were from the late 19th century and early 20th century, and from before the First World War. You have people talking about their lives in domestic service, for example.

"We also did a three-year music project, which was lottery funded, in which we asked people to come forward to speak about music in the city. We got two books out of that - Rhythm And Romance, about popular music in the 20s, 30s and 40s, and Something In The Air, about the 1950s and 1960s."

Other publications down the years have included York Memories at Work, about working life in York before 1952; York Memories at Home, about domestic life in the city between 1900 and 1960; Through The Storm: The Second World War in York; and Public Houses, Private Lives, a history of the city's pubs.

Many of the books are now out of print. But the recordings on which they are based are still stored safely in the Society's archive. And you'll be able to hear some of them for yourselves in Coney Street from next week...