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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Michelle Johansen – Inhabiting London’s Public Libraries c.1890-1914

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


Living in Institutions

Education

Michelle Johansen (Raphael Samuel History Centre):
Inhabiting London’s Public Libraries c.1890-1914

Charles Goss (1864-1946) was chief librarian of Lewisham rate-assisted library in south-east London from 1891 until 1897. In 1897 he was appointed chief librarian of the Bishopsgate Institute, a library and cultural institution situated on the border of the City and the East End. Goss remained in charge at the Institute until 1941.

In 1895, Goss co-founded the Society of Public Librarians (SPL), a group of thirty-plus London librarians who met monthly until 1930 to discuss professional issues and offer mutual support and friendship. Examining the SPL archive alongside the writings of Goss, it becomes apparent that the inhabitant experience enjoyed by Goss at Lewisham then Bishopsgate reflected the experience of others of his generation of public librarians. Here was a cohort of young men utilising particular elements of their working environments to augment their relatively fragile socio-cultural status as subaltern professionals.

Between 1890 and 1906 almost eighty new rate-assisted libraries were opened in London. Many included residential provision for the librarian in charge: purpose-built apartments, located over or alongside the library buildings. The available evidence suggests an imprecise boundary separated the private from the public arena. Goss and his SPL colleagues possessed their own book-lined studies. These officially public spaces were sometimes used as an adjunct to their private homes, the setting for social gatherings and club meetings, wives and daughters on hand to assist with refreshments or provide entertainment after the evening’s business had been concluded.

My paper will use the case of Goss and his SPL colleagues to describe the experience of institutional living in the first public libraries in London. It will show how these librarians exercised agency in influencing spatial provision to accommodate their own needs and desires and it will indicate how class, gender and age all played a part in this particular ‘inhabitant’ process.

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