About

Ronald Blythe's Akenfield has been on Sarah Simpson-Enock's bookshelf for many years. It is a book that reveals people's souls in the ordinary words they use to tell about their day to day lives. It listens and tells the truth. It is not a census. It is a sacrament. Tales holds this as its benchmark.

Every life contains a story that has never been told to a stranger. Not because it is secret, but because no one ever asked. Tales asks. It sits with people in their kitchens and their pubs and their back gardens, and it records what they say as faithfully as it can. Then it sets those words alongside a photograph and puts them somewhere they will not disappear.

The project began in Ramsgate and will not end there. It moves outward, town by town, life by life, for as long as there are people willing to be heard.

Sarah Simpson-Enock is the founder and sole creator of Tales. She came to this work through a love of listening, a long acquaintance with loss, and a conviction that the stories that go unrecorded are precisely the ones that matter most.

Tales grew out of Ramsgate Tales, an oral history of the town that ran from May 2025 to April 2026, concluding with an exhibition at St George's Church. That project included photographs by Fiona Murray. It confirmed what its founder already knew: that every ordinary life contains an extraordinary story. Tales takes that conviction further.