When a country changes the legal status of millions of people, the human cost is easily lost in the noise of politics, reduced to figures, deadlines and the language of negotiation. This archive exists to hold on to what those abstractions leave out: the testimony of EU citizens who lived through the UK’s departure from the EU and its consequences. It matters because lived experience is itself evidence: for researchers tracing how policy is actually felt, for journalists and campaigners seeking the human reality behind the headlines, and above all for the people themselves, who deserve to have their experiences recognised rather than erased. BLEA is built to centre the voices and experiences of EU citizens in the UK. It is the hope to eventually include a similar volume of data relating to the experiences of British citizens resident in the EU.

This archive was created by migration historian Tanja Bueltmann. She comes to this work from two directions at once, and the archive is shaped by both. The first is scholarly. As a historian of migration and diaspora, she has long held that history is not divorced from the present, and that historians have a part to play in informing it. These testimonies were gathered in that spirit: a deliberate effort to document, in EU citizens’ own words, an experience that too easily gets flattened into statistics, headlines and the language of negotiation. Recording lived experiences, and coding it so that patterns across many accounts become legible, is one way to ensure experiences are preserved for the record rather than lost once the news cycle moves on. The second motivation is personal. A dual German-British national, Tanja is herself an EU citizen, and she shares many of the experiences set down here. Her concern with Brexit has always been at once professional and personal. Alongside her academic work she became a citizens’-rights campaigner, advocating for the millions of people whose lives were unsettled by the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union.