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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Jane Hamlett & Rebecca Preston – Spaces and Material Cultures in Charitable Lodging Houses in London, 1840-1914

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

Jane Hamlett & Rebecca Preston (Royal Holloway): Spaces and
Material Cultures in Charitable Lodging Houses in London, 1840-1914

This paper examines the material culture of the Rowton Houses – new large-scale institutional spaces that housed working men in 1890s London. The first house at Vauxhall was founded in 1893 by Lord Rowton (Montagu Corry), the Tory peer and philanthropist who had formerly been Disraeli’s private secretary. A large-scale lodging house for working men, the enterprise was not charitable but designed to be self-supporting, and was one of a range of semi-philanthropic initiatives that emerged in response to the 1880s housing crisis in London. The success of the first house was followed by the foundation of five larger houses at Kings Cross, Hammersmith, Whitechapel, Camden and Newington Butts. The buildings provided a range of living rooms in addition to cubicle sleeping spaces, and the largest accommodated 800 men. How these buildings were laid out, decorated and used reveals the tension between the intentions of the founders, and the men who lived in and experienced the institution as a home. Rowton invested time and money in the houses and paid close attention to minute details of their physical layout. When opened the cavernous buildings were almost universally praised in the contemporary press and compared to clubs for upper-class men in the West End. Indeed, the carefully fitted interiors and lavish decoration suggest that the houses were intended to create a shared domesticity that crossed class boundaries. But those who inhabited the buildings experienced these interiors somewhat differently. We will explore how ‘home’ was constructed by the inmates of these new institutions, through duration of residence, use of space, and will consider how institutional living was framed by a series of thresholds and material boundaries.

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