Inhabiting Institutions in Britain, 1700-1950 – conference page

in Academic Service - Archive by on September 15th, 2010

Royal Holloway University of London Department of History

Event Date: 14 and 15 September 2010
11 Bedford Square, Royal Holloway (Central London)

Inhabiting Institutions in Britain, 1700-1950

Tuesday 14th September
Spaces and Institutional Structures



Workhouses
  • Jeremy Boulton (Newcastle):
    Paupers and their experience of a Georgian workhouse: St Martin in the Fields, 1725-1824
    (AUDIO HERE)
  • Alysa Levene (Oxford Brookes) :
    Family life and London workhouses in the later eighteenth century (AUDIO HERE)
  • Alannah Tomkins (Keele) :
    At Home in the Workhouse? The View from Working-Class Autobiographies, 1780-1920 (AUDIO HERE)
  • panel 1 questions .

Institutional environments and boundaries

  • Fiona Fisher (Kingston):
    Viewing the institutional interior through the pages of Living London (AUDIO HERE)
  • Jane Hamlett & Rebecca Preston (Royal Holloway):
    Spaces and Material Cultures in Charitable Lodging Houses in London, 1840-1914
    (AUDIO HERE)
  • Stephen Soanes (Warwick):
    “The Place was a Home from Home”: Patient Identity and Belonging in Cottage Homes for Convalescents, 1910 – 1939 (AUDIO HERE)
  • panel 2 questions .

Asylums

  • Louise Hide (Birkbeck):
    People in their place: space, gender and class in the late 19th century asylum (AUDIO HERE)
  • Clare Hickman (Bristol):
    “Conceive a Spacious Building Resembling the Palace of a Peer. Airy, and Elevated, and Elegantly Surrounded by Swelling Grounds and Gardens”: The role of the gardens in domesticating the environment of the nineteenth-century lunatic asylum
    (AUDIO HERE)
  • Katherine Rawling (Royal Holloway):
    Asylum Snapshots: Institutional Photographic Practices and Patient Images at Holloway Sanatorium, Surrey, 1880-1910
    (AUDIO HERE)
  • Anna Shepherd (London):
    The Domestic Environment as Therapy in Two Surrey Asylums’ (AUDIO HERE)
  • panel 3 questions .


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Wednesday 15th September
Living in Institutions


Material cultures

  • Matthew Newsome Kerr (Santa Clara University ): 
    Pauperised by the Public Health?:  Taste and Citizenship in London’s Infectious Disease Asylums, 1871-1891 (AUDIO HERE)
  • Carmen Mangion (Birkbeck):
    ‘a bright home to the little ones’: Late-nineteenth-century English Hospitals and the domestic paradigm (AUDIO HERE)
  • Ayla Lepine (Courtauld Institute): 
    Manifesting the Rule: Designing for Monasticism in Victorian Oxford (AUDIO HERE)
  • panel 4 questions .

Education

  • Quintin Colville (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich): 
    Designed, inhabited and exploited: the naval training establishment HMS Ganges, 1905-1950 (audio not available)
  • Susan Skedd (English Heritage) :
    ‘Everything necessary to facilitate the acquisition of knowledge’. Eighteenth-century girls’ boarding schools and their contribution towards the institutionalization of education (AUDIO HERE)
  • Michelle Johansen (Raphael Samuel History Centre): 
    Inhabiting London’s Public Libraries c.1890-1914 (AUDIO HERE)
  • William Whyte (Oxford): 
    An essential part of the best kind of University training’: Halls of Residence at the Civic Universities, 1900-1950 (AUDIO HERE)
  • panel 5 questions .

Home in the institution

  • Mary Clare Martin (Greenwich): 
    Refuge or prison? Girls’ experiences of a “home” for the mentally defective in early twentieth century Scotland (AUDIO HERE)
  • Krisztina Robert (Roehampton):
    At Home in the Armed Forces: Living Quarters of the Women’s Services in First World War Britain and France (AUDIO HERE)
  • Vicky Long (Manchester): 
    Industrial Homes: Domesticating Factories in Interwar Britain (AUDIO HERE)
  • panel 6 questions .

Round table (AUDIO HERE)

Speakers: Sandra Cavallo (Royal Holloway), Virginia Crossman (Oxford Brookes), Sue Hawkins (Kingston), Andrea Tanner (Kingston) others TBC

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Fiona Fisher – Viewing the institutional interior through the pages of Living London

in Academic Service - Archive by on September 14th, 2010

Royal Holloway University of London Department of History

Event Date:

14 and 15 September 2010

11 Bedford Square, Royal Holloway (Central London)

 

Inhabiting Institutions in Britain, 1700-1950

Spaces and Institutional Structures

Institutional environments and boundaries

Fiona Fisher (Kingston): Viewing the institutional interior through the pages of Living London

This paper will explore the visual representation of institutional interiors within a three volume collection of writings, Living London, edited by George R. Sims and published by Cassell & Company between 1902 and 1903. In the prologue to Living London Sims set out the editorial aims of the publication:

The history of London has been written, the story of its streets has been told, again and again. But the life of London in all its phases and aspects has never until now been exhaustively attempted…With pen and pencil, with camera and snapshot, those who are associated with this work have laid every phase of London life under contribution. Wherever photography has been practicable it has been relied upon, because no other process of reproduction is at once so actual and so convincing.

Living London contains around sixty photographs of institutional interiors, including those of metropolitan prisons, lodging houses, workhouses, orphanages, lunatic asylums, charitable institutions and shelters for immigrants. These images record a variety of interior environments, which can be broadly divided into spaces for sleep, work, recreation, food preparation and dining, and include, among others, parlours, wards, kitchens, refectories and workrooms. In contrast to contemporary architectural photographs, which often depict uninhabited interiors, the photographs are heavily populated and attempt to ‘document’ lived experience within the environments that they record. Through an analysis of a selection of photographs the paper will explore the evidence that the collection offers of the spatial, material and aesthetic organisation of London’s c.1900 institutional interiors, and of everyday life within them. In doing so it will consider the ways in which the environments represented might be interpreted in relation to other public and private interiors of the period, and within the context of a broadly defined domesticity extending beyond the individual private dwelling.

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