As was the case for many heads of history, Jack Brown was prompted by the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 to reflect afresh on the content and questions asked within his school’s history curriculum, paying particular attention to local history. In this article he sets out the principles and purposes that framed his department’s approach to developing and refining a series of local history enquiries across the course of Key Stage 3. He explains and illustrates the decisions taken by the department, which extended to their choice of GCSE units – as they sought not merely to make their curriculum more representative of the diversity of the local community and its history, but also to engage critically with the legacies of colonialism...