Collecting Postwar London: The City in the Archive
Summer 2024, Session Two – Matthew Harle
- 1 July to 9 August 2024
- Paul Mellon Centre
Mondays and Wednesdays 10am–12.15pm
Collecting Postwar London is a course designed to help students interpret London’s modern cultural history through its archives and collections. From 1945 to the turn of the century, Britain’s capital went from imperial superpower to social democracy to one of the headquarters of global finance. With these three epochs came new migrant populations, subcultures, ideas, artistic forms and social identities set against a shifting urban landscape where the municipal housing of the welfare state was superseded by the architecture of the free market. Through a series of thematic seminars and trips to London’s archives and galleries to search for evidence, Collecting Postwar London attempts to look for the people, places and practices that define half a century of London’s history. With a focus on the specific and the marginal, the course explores collections of historic protest, to rave culture, to examining the archiving methods at work in the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths. Collecting Postwar London demonstrates how the work of curators and archivists interpret these broad, complex themes through the material traces of individuals and groups in their collecting and exhibition making.