You are here: Backdoor Broadcasting Company Tag: Whyte (William)

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 .


——————————————————————

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

3 Comments

William Whyte – An essential part of the best kind of University training’: Halls of Residence at the Civic Universities, 1900-1950

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

William Whyte (St John’s College, Oxford)
‘An essential part of the best kind of University training’: Halls of Residence at the Civic Universities, 1900-1950

In the first half of the twentieth century, the hall of residence became a distinctive and important element in student life at the ‘Redbrick’ universities. It became, in fact, ‘An essential part of the best kind of University training’. Hall life, it was argued, would help create community, foster academic excellence, and instil a proper university spirit. This paper will explore the halls and the debate they engendered. It will counter those writers who have seen in the halls nothing more than a fruitless imitation of Oxbridge, arguing instead that the halls of residence were part of a distinctive Redbrick university life. It will examine the rules and regulations of the halls – and especially their design, looking at the ways in which those who built them and ran them sought to inspire occupants with a sense of university community. It will also attempt to assess how students responded to these ideals.

Although neglected or disparaged by most other writers, I hope to show that these establishments provide a unique insight into civic university life in this period. The hall of residence was, on one hand, a marginal place: it was not central to the actual process of studying at university; it had to negotiate the difficult balancing act of being distinctive but not separate from a unified institution. On the other hand, the hall was seen as a vital component of university life: the solution to many of Redbrick’s problems. The tensions and opportunities that this ambivalence created will not only illuminate the halls themselves but also shed light on the wider question of what inhabiting institutions actually means.

——————————————————————

PLAY

 

download

—————————————————————-

 

<== back to conference page

No Comments
© 2011 | Backdoor Broadcasting Company