CHPPC Events

Wednesday 13 January, 5.30 pm (ONLINE)

Professor Tracey Hill and Dr Charlotte Berry (Bath Spa University)

Principal Investigator Professor Tracey Hill and Post Doctoral Research Assistant, Dr Charlotte Berry introduce the work of the REED Civic London project, which will transcribe and publish records of dramatic and musical performance in the City of London from the start of the reign of Elizabeth I to 1642. Focussed on civic pageantry and performances sponsored by the City's livery companies, the project's research overturns the assumption that early modern London's governing bodies were opposed to drama and uninterested in theatrical traditions. This paper will cover some of the exciting discoveries made by the project so far, including the early use of livery company halls as venues for theatrical performance.

All welcome- this seminar is free to attend, but advance registration is required.

Wednesday 27 January, 5.30 pm (ONLINE)

Eleanor Barnett, Jamie Brett, Catherine Clarke, Lauren Eglen, Lisa Der Weduwe and Jamal Langley

Wednesday 10 February, 5.30 pm (ONLINE)

Stephen Gadd and Colin Greenstreet invite discussion of a new project which aims to record the state and development of highways (both roads and navigable waterways) in England and Wales between 1540 and 1660, the period during which the network developed from one serving primarily local agricultural markets to one fit for an emerging industrial economy. Rather than identifying wholly new infrastructure, they hope to discover when and where network stresses occurred and were remedied, and when particular highway sections became identified as ‘principal routes’. Such analysis will help to identify the geographic scope and scale of industrial development and decline.

Adapting collaborative methods deployed by Colin with great success on the Marine Lives project, Viæ Regiæ will assimilate a vast array of evidence from primary sources such as Quarter Sessions, parish, and probate records. This will be gathered by local experts and enthusiasts around the country, building bridges between academic and public historians. For the first time we will see how a network of roads, bridges, and waterways serving ports and market towns developed from the disruption of Dissolution recorded in John Leland’s Itineraries, through the trail-blazing mapping of Christopher Saxton’s county series to the first national road maps a century later.

All welcome - this seminar is free to attend, but advance registration is require

Wednesday 24 February, 5.30 pm

Dr Sophie Vohra (University of York/Railway Museum)

This paper will examine the ways British railways have and continue to be celebrated by communities with regional connections to this industry’s history. Examining two different types of commemorative events – the long-running annual Camborne Trevithick Day and the planning for the bicentenary of the Stockton and Darlington Railway (S&DR) in the North East of England – it will demonstrate how and why communities engage with their industrial landscape and their associated symbols of railway history. Celebrating a local nineteenth-century engineer, Richard Trevithick, each year, the former has become a recurring feature of the wider culture of the Cornish town and its industrial history. The S&DR has been celebrated at every 50-year juncture since it opened in 1825. Currently in the planning stages, the bicentenary celebrations in 2025 and beyond will be ambitious, and are being designed to celebrate the history of this pioneering railway as well as to protect and conserve the heritage of the region and to benefit the local communities in the long term.

All welcome- this seminar is free to attend, but advance registration is required.

Wednesday 30 September, 5.30pm (ONLINE)

Joanna Terry - Staffordshire Heritage and Archives

Lucy Shipley - Portable Antiquities Scheme

Ben Paites - Colchester Castle Museums

All welcome - This event is free, but booking is required.

In the context of the global Covid-19 pandemic, spring 2020 saw ‘lockdown’ across the UK. How has this experience of lockdown nuanced our understanding of local and regional identities, and the history of locality and place? How has 2020 highlighted the significance of local experience and local placed identities? How can professionals in history and heritage record COVID 19 as a lived and local experience, archiving the impact on specific communities? This seminar approaches these questions – and how different disciplines based in localities have responded to them - through museums, archives and archaeology.

Joanna Terry is the Head of Archives and Heritage, Staffordshire, Dr Lucy Shipley is the Finds Liaison Officer for the Portable Antiquities Scheme for Devon and Ben Paites is the Collections and Learning Curator at Colchester Castle Museum. They will discuss the challenges (and opportunities) of lockdown to the understanding of history and heritage and how it is recorded.

Wednesday 14 October, 5.30pm (ONLINE)

Corinne Fowler, Professor of Postcolonial Literature, University of Leicester

All welcome - This event is free, but booking is required.

Colonial Countryside is a child-led history and writing project funded by HLF and ACE in partnership with the National Trust. 100 children visited 11 Trust houses and explored their African, Caribbean and East India Company connections. This talk will explore the underlying research questions and key themes which drive the project and work in the historic housing sector more broadly.

A lot has been learned about what "child-led" means and what it achieved. Some children led guided tours. Others redesigned guidebooks, wrote pamphlets for visitors or made videos about country houses' colonial links for Twitter. Colonial Countryside also produced, with two curriculum experts, lessons for year 5 pupils which teach the history of empire focused on local histories of five cities and National Trust properties. This has already had a positive impact and an example is provided of the benefit of these curriculum materials to a Toxteth Primary school and its teachers.

Wednesday 28 October, 5.30pm (ONLINE)

Howard Spencer - English Heritage

All welcome - This event is free, but booking is required.
 

Howard Spencer, a senior historian with English Heritage, leads a perambulation around the plaques – blue and otherwise – and discusses the people and places so marked, as well as the how, why and when they came to be commemorated. Among the plaques featured will be those put up by the London-wide councils, English Heritage, and the Bedford Estate. The session will also include critical discussion of the politics of plaques and memorialisation.

Wednesday 11 November, 5.30pm (ONLINE)

Roland Quinault - Senior Research Fellow, IHR

All welcome - This event is free, but booking is required.

The Metropolitan Police force, established in 1829, was the largest in Britain and grew steadily throughout the later 19th century. Historians of the Met have paid little attention to the outlook and activities of ordinary constables, about whom there is little evidence. But in my possession is the notebook of one constable, who was my great-grandfather, Rowland Hunt. The notebook lists his duties, while on beat patrol, point duty or special service. in Lambeth, which was a centre of working class trading, criminal activity and popular culture. Most incidents recorded in the notebook related either to drunkenness or to traffic collisions. Hunt also acted as a community support worker and was posted to the local gasworks during the gas workers strike. He avoided expressing a partisan political view but was, in his private capacity, a strong Conservative. Like many other recruits from rural areas, Hunt did not gain promotion but remained in the Met until he was entitled to a pension after 25 years’ service. Throughout his service he retained close links with his rural homeland.

Wednesday 25 November, 5.30pm (ONLINE)

Mike Esbester, University of Portsmouth

All welcome - This event is free, but booking is required.

As historians, how do we handle sensitive or traumatic pasts? And what happens when we get a variety of researchers involved? In this seminar, I’ll look at how the ‘Railway Work, Life & Death’ project is engaging with different audiences to explore accidents to British and Irish railway workers before 1939. A joint initiative of the Modern Records Centre, National Railway Museum and University of Portsmouth, and working with The National Archives, we’ve been working with teams of volunteers to transcribe and make freely available accident reports. People who wouldn’t see themselves as railway historians have been coming together to get involved – understanding the expertises they bring will be a theme of this seminar, which will provide a forum to think about some of the challenges of researching difficult pasts in a public way.

Wednesday 29 April, 5.30pm, IHR Pollard Room (301)

Corinne Fowler, Professor of Postcolonial Literature, University of Leicester

Colonial Countryside is a child-led history and writing project funded by HLF and ACE in partnership with the National Trust. 100 children visited 11 Trust houses and explored their African, Caribbean and East India Company connections. This talk will explore the underlying research questions and key themes which drive the project and work in the historic housing sector more broadly.

A lot has been learned about what "child-led" means and what it achieved. Some children led guided tours. Others redesigned guidebooks, wrote pamphlets for visitors or made videos about country houses' colonial links for Twitter. Colonial Countryside also produced, with two curriculum experts, lessons for year 5 pupils which teach the history of empire focused on local histories of five cities and National Trust properties. This has already had a positive impact and an example is provided of the benefit of these curriculum materials to a Toxteth Primary school and its teachers.

Wednesday 13 May, 5.30pm, meet on Malet Street outside Senate House

Howard Spencer, English Heritage

Howard Spencer, a senior historian with English Heritage, leads a perambulation around the plaques – blue and otherwise – and discusses the people and places so marked, as well as the how, why and when they came to be commemorated. Among the plaques featured will be those put up by the London-wide councils, English Heritage, and the Bedford Estate.

Wednesday 27 May, 5.30pm, IHR Pollard Room (301)

Allan Brodie, Historic England

As summer approaches, for many of us our thoughts turn to the future; perhaps interesting travel, fine dining and a sun-kissed beach lie ahead. Of course reality rarely meets expectations - long queues at the airport, threadbare paella and an overcrowded beach with watery beer.

But enough of Allan Brodie’s holiday woes! After years of studying England’s seaside, Historic England’s very own beach boy will describe the key issues that have faced our holiday resorts during their rise, fall and their continuing fall /rise again. At the heart of his work has been to understand, celebrate and champion the English seaside and his presentation will look behind the headlines to explore the strengths and opportunities of towns and cities as different as Blackpool, Scarborough and Brighton. He will describe how his work has combined academic research with trying to harness the historic environment as a tool to market seaside resorts, through posing questions such as ‘Why Bath and why not Weymouth?’ and ‘Why Nice, when Brighton awaits’?

Wednesday 24 June, 5.30pm, IHR Pollard Room (301)

Ben Wilcock, Academic Research and Engagement Coordinator, North-West Region, National Trust

2019 marked the bicentenary of the Peterloo Massacre, and throughout the year cultural organisations in and around Manchester commemorated the violent suppression of the peaceful protest at St Peter’s Fields. Two of the properties that the National Trust looks after in the North have a strong connection to the Massacre: the Greg family who owned Quarry Bank were eyewitnesses and spoke out against the militia’s brutality in the subsequent trial; while at Dunham Massey the Earl of Stamford – George Grey – was the head of the militia that led the charge. At the Trust, we’ve been working with our research-active volunteers to delve into the property-specific archives relating to the massacre; with academic researchers to contextualise this research; and with artists who have developed a creative response to tell these stories in an engaging and responsible way to our visitors.

Wednesday 15 January, 5.30pm 

Booking required: to book your free place, see Events Page.

This event launches ‘English Places’: the exciting new app from the Victoria County History, which puts authoritative histories of places across England at your fingertips, whether you’re browsing at home or out and about exploring. Please join us to celebrate the launch, and for our broader discussion of digital mapping projects, place and public history.  The launch will be introduced by Catherine Clarke, Professor in the History of People, Place and Community, IHR and will follow a panel session which will discuss digital mapping platforms in academic and public history contexts.

Chair: Matt Bristow (CHPPC/Historic England)

Panel:

Peter Insole (Principal Historic Environment Officer, Know Your Place Bristol)

Sarah Jones (Head of Geomatics, Museum of London Archaeology)

Seif El Rashidi (Project Manager, Layers of London)

Professor Andrew McCrae (University of Exeter, Co-Director Places of Poetry)

The challenge for digital mapping platforms like Layers of London and Know Your Place West, and for national projects which focus on the local, such as the Victoria County History, is to move beyond the immediate locality towards crowd sourced national histories.  The potential for digital mapping platforms to be ‘franchised’, allowing expansion beyond the geographical and organisational boundaries of an individual project, opens up exciting possibilities for the creation of interconnected, multi-layered resources which combine to speak to our collective national history.  How can academics, community groups and members of the public harness the potential of digital mapping platforms to expand the horizons of our histories from the local to the national?

Wednesday 29 January, 5.30pm, IHR Pollard Room (301)

David Green (King's College London)

Doug Brown (Kingston University)

The Post Office was an extremely important institution and London was the focal point of its operations. However, London postal workers were relatively unhealthy and the majority had retired  before they reached sixty, mainly because of ill health.  Using new evidence drawn from pension records, we explore the extent of ill health in the London workforce, comparing it to that in the Metropolitan Police. For postmen, orthopaedic conditions were the main problem, relating to the ability to walk long distances.  This was similar to the problems encountered in the police. For other postal workers, notably letter sorters, mental illness and poor vision were the main problems, relating to the pressure of having to work irregular hours, often at night-time and in poorly designed and overcrowded workspaces. These problems were exacerbated by the increasing frequency of mail deliveries and the constant shortage of space in the main headquarters building. In response to these issues and workers’ concerns, the Post Office introduced a range of measures including a medical service and generous sickness pay, more offices, new technologies to speed the flow of mail, better lighting, and changed working practices to ease pressures on the workforce. We conclude by considering the implications of understanding ill health in the Post Office as part of a broader discussion of morbidity during the so called 'epidemiological transition' of the late nineteenth century.

Wednesday 12 February, 5.30pm, IHR Pollard Room (301)

Melanie Backe-Hansen: House-Historian

Deborah Sugg Ryan, Professor of Design History and Theory; Associate Dean of Research

The history of houses and the home is an area of popular interest and a window into social history. Our two speakers have both been involved in the highly successful BBC series, ‘A House through Time’.

In conversation, Deborah and Melanie will draw on their work in the history of residential houses through different ages. Using a range of case studies of historic houses, including those featured in A House Through Time, modest inter-war homes, and older houses back to the sixteenth century, they will look at the tools and sources to explore social history and how to uncover the history to be found in our homes.

Melanie and Deborah’s books will also be available to purchase (cash only) on the night.

Wednesday 26 February, 5.30pm, IHR Pollard Room (301)

Ken Crowe - VCH Essex

Findings from an Essex pilot project with wider potential.  Using Essex as the basis for this study, we shall illustrate how documentary and archaeological evidence can illuminate the process of dismantling the monasteries following the dissolution of 1536-40, and the re-use (or recycling) of monastic materials. Other related themes (which we will not have time to consider in any detail) include the conversion of monastic buildings to other uses.

Wednesday 25 March, 5.30pm, IHR Pollard Room (301)

Who should be on the platform for this discussion? This week, we’re experimenting with a crowdsourced approach – you tell us who you think could make an exciting contribution to the conversation, and we’ll invite them to join us!

How are places commemorated? How do schemes such as blue plaques identify and select individuals and groups worth of public memory? How are significant events chosen and linked to the interpretation of places? What lines of exclusion or under-representation can we identify? And how are alternative, radical projects seeking to forge new, more socially-inclusive or creative approaches to place and commemoration?

Join the debate on social media and nominate a speaker or project by the end of February 2020, when we’ll make a selection. We’re looking forward to your ideas!

Wednesday 25 September, 6pm
Booking required: to book your free place, see the event page.

Nino Strachey, National Head of Research, National Trust
Owain Lloyd-James, National Head of Places Strategy, Historic England
Nayan Kulkarni, Site-specific / Public Realm Artist and Researcher
Leanne O’Boyle, Head of Cultural and Visitor Strategy, City of London Corporation

How is history mobilised in place-making strategies today? How is heritage used to regenerate spaces, drive economic development or shape community identities? How does the past enrich and shape a sense of place? And what limitations, lines of exclusion, or challenges should we be alert to? Whether you’re a researcher, practitioner, or interested in your own community, join the panel in conversation with Catherine Clarke, IHR Professor in the History of People, Place and Community, for a critical discussion of history in place-making strategies today. This event also launches the Centre for the History of People, Place and Community, with a wine reception. Please join us to celebrate!

Wednesday 9 October, 5.30pm

Ben Wilcock, Academic Research and Engagement Coordinator, North-West Region, National Trust

2019 marks the bicentenary of the Peterloo Massacre, and throughout the year cultural organisations in and around Manchester are commemorating the violent suppression of the peaceful protest at St Peter’s Fields. Two of the properties that the National Trust looks after in the North have a strong connection to the Massacre: the Greg family who owned Quarry Bank were eyewitnesses and spoke out against the militia’s brutality in the subsequent trial; while at Dunham Massey the Earl of Stamford – George Grey – was the head of the militia that led the charge. At the Trust, we’ve been working with our research-active volunteers to delve into the property-specific archives relating to the massacre; with academic researchers to contextualise this research; and with artists who have developed a creative response to tell these stories in an engaging and responsible way to our visitors.

Wednesday 23 October, 5.30pm
Booking required: to book your free place, see the event page.
Led by Tom Woolley, artist, illustrator and mapmaker (www.tomwoolley.com)

Are you interested in the history and heritage of place? Do you use maps in your research or practice? Artist Tom Woolley creates maps for heritage sites, visitor attractions, towns and cities. His work includes maps for Sherwood Forest, Leeds Industrial Museum, the City of Birmingham, the St Thomas Way and Bolton Abbey, as well as independent projects such as ‘Myths & Legends of the British Isles’. In this workshop, Tom will share and reflect on his practice, then lead a hands-on map-making workshop. How could creative mapping help you to think in fresh ways about your place-based research? How could creative maps form an interpretation or public engagement tool? Come and have a go – no artistic experience or talent necessary!

Wednesday 6 November, 5.30pm

David Killingray, Emeritus Professor at Goldsmiths; Senior Research Fellow in the School of Advanced Study, University of London

Every day can be an adventure: where will we go, who might we meet, what will we talk about, and what could we learn? In 1891 Percyvall Bowen, a Kent farmer, took a holiday in the Canary Islands.  When he boarded the ship to return home, he met a group of South African Muslim pilgrims bound for Mecca via London. While sightseeing in London the Malays were seen by Queen Victoria who commanded them to come to tea. What do these encounters tell us about people, place and communities in a hierarchical and racially ordered imperial world?

Wednesday 20 November, from 4.30pm
Booking required: to book your free place, see the event page.

The Victoria County History – an ongoing project to write the history of every county in England – is famous for its iconic ‘Red Books’. This year, we’re celebrating the 120th anniversary of the Victoria County History with VCH Red Boxes. Counties across England have filled special Red Boxes with objects which represent their history in quirky or surprising ways. What secrets and stories will we discover? Join us for our ‘Unboxing’ party (from 4.30pm), with exhibition, object handling and live 3D printing; and panel discussion (5.30-7pm). A great opportunity to encounter some secret histories, explore public history practice, and learn more about the VCH project and how you could get involved. Free drinks and nibbles provided.

Wednesday 4 December, 5.30pm, , IHR Pollard Room (301)/Alternative Venue

Annette Day, Head of Content Delivery, Museum of London
Alex Werner, Lead Curator, New Museum at the Museum of London
In conversation with Matthew Davies, Professor of Urban History and Executive Dean, School of Social Sciences, History and Philosophy, Birkbeck, University of London

This meeting of the seminar will focus on the opportunities and challenges involved in the development of the new Museum of London, which will move to a new site in the General Market buildings in West Smithfield in 2023. Through presentations and a panel discussion, the seminar will explore some of the thinking behind the Museum masterplan, the use of the new spaces, the opening up of the Museum’s collections, and the engagement with Londoners to communicate the stories of people and places across more than 2,000 years of the capital’s history.