We are excited to be launching a series of evening talks for 2019, starting this month and running through to the next academic year.

We’ll be hosting sociable, relaxed after-work events,  perfect for anyone who is interested to come into UCL to learn about the wonderful rare books, archives and manuscripts that we hold here.  Each evening will present a particular topic or theme; talks and collection displays with wine, soft drinks and nibbles for all.  What more could anyone want?!

Our first Late will be ‘Protest!  Voices of dissent in art and text’.  Guest speakers Egidija Čiricaitė and Susannah Walker will join us to explore this theme through their fascinating research and corresponding collection items.

Although all of our Lates events will have academic research at their core, they will be accessible and are open to all aged 16+.  We hope you can join us for the first of what will be a regular series of talks and evening events to inspire, intrigue and amuse!

Get your ticket now!

Protest! Voices of dissent in art and text

Date: Tuesday, 26th March, 6.15-8pm
Venue: UCL Haldane Room, Wilkins Building, Gower Street, WC1E 6BT

The Small Press Project: In Conversation with Egidija Čiricaitė and Liz Lawes

The Small Press Project from Slade School of Fine Art takes inspiration from UCL Special Collections’ small press collection each year. This year’s project, Visions of Protest: BLAKE THE MARCH, has been used as a critical lens through which artists, academics and students can focus on what connections exist between the democracy of print, their aesthetics and the autonomy of artists’ books and publishing. The project is formed through a programme of workshops, performances, screenings, talks, collaborations and interdisciplinary practices involving non-academic institutions and the public.  Egidija Čiricaitė will be in conversation with Liz Lawes, our very own small press collections expert (and UCL’s Subject Liaison Librarian: Fine Art, History of Art and Film Studies).

Egidjia Čiricaitė publishes books, exhibitions, and book related projects.  Although firmly based within contemporary artists’ books practice, her varied interests can be loosely divided between book history and contemporary metaphor theories (in linguistics).  Egidija is co-curator of Prescriptions project of artists’ books and medical humanities (University of Kent). She is co-curating Artists’ Books Now events at the British Library and is currently studying for her PhD at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL.

Printing Peterloo

On the 16^th August 1819, a peaceful protest for electoral reform at St Peter’s Fields Manchester was suppressed. The large crowd, assembled to hear the orator Henry Hunt, were charged on by the local yeomanry cavalry resulting in casualties and injuries. The events became known as “Peterloo”, an ironic reference to the Battle of Waterloo of 1815. This was a pivotal moment in the histories of democracy, protest and “working class politics.” Peterloo inspired political pamphlets, poetry and caricature and most recently Mike Leigh’s film of 2018. This session will consider the memory of Peterloo in print using objects from UCL Special Collections and The British Museum.

Susannah Walker was a Teaching Fellow in History of Art at UCL from 2014 to 2018 specialising in Print Culture and Romanticism, and is currently working as a curator in the British Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings. Her recent work has involved cataloguing and researching a range of political pamphlets produced in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars.

Wine (or a soft drink) and nibbles are included with your £3 ticket. Click here to book your place.

January is always a good time to reflect on our achievements and look forward to our upcoming plans and projects. Read on to discover some of the Outreach team’s highlights from last year’s Special Collection’s schools programmes – and what to expect from them next…

Teacher CPD with First Story

Helen Biggs from UCL Special Collections and Jay Bhadricha from First Story preparing for the visiting teachers.

Last year we built on our valuable relationship with the charity First Story to devise a CPD event for GCSE English Language teachers.  The event sought to help teachers develop ways of enabling pupils to write creatively on topics they know little, or nothing, about (in response to current GCSE examination expectations), using Special Collection items as examples of prompts.

We’re running this event again (only bigger and better!) on the evening of Tuesday 19 March. If you are a Secondary school English teacher and would like to attend, you can get tickets here.

Curriculum Support for Secondary Schools

Our vision for 2019 is to develop school relationships in a strategic way.  We want to reach as many young people as we can, sharing the incredible collection that we look after, with meaningful, enriching experiences; one way to do this is to develop a ‘menu’ of curriculum relevant workshops that schools can book with us.

We have a team of volunteer researchers helping us to find unique items that are relevant to curriculum areas and once we have made the resources and planned the workshops we will pilot them with the schools with whom we have a close working relationship.

A slide from the PowerPoint for the Year 11 session on Stevenson’s ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’. It features a section of a Toxicology lecture from UCL (Christison, Robert, 1831, Christison Lecture Notes, MS ADD 316) regarding gentlemen’s recreational experimentation with Cyanide. This was found by a volunteer researcher.

An example is our session for GCSE pupils that explores the context of Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

We recently piloted it with Year 11s at East London Science School.

We have also developed a workshop on the context of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.  Our vast collections covering British and European medical history have meant the session features unique resources; surprise and intrigue abounds in Year 10 classrooms as they learn about the practice of body-snatching, and just why Carswell’s drawings are so important!

School 21: Real World Learning

For the second year running, we are working with School21 in Newham to participate in their Real World Learning programme. This provides both students and their host workplaces with something that is more meaningful and authentic than a traditional work experience programme. For a term, two Year 12s are spending half a day each week with UCL Special Collections, solving an authentic problem for the department.

Last year’s participants worked to develop a crowdfunding campaign to raise funds to conserve and digitise selections from UCL’s collection of student magazines (from the College Archive).  We’re excited to see what their successors Munna and Umar will do this year; we have given them the task of creating welcome resources for a new landing page on our website.

UCL Special Collections Summer School – Protest in Print

After the success of 2018’s UCL Special Collections Summer School, we are happy to announce that we were successful in our bid to Widening Participation to run another programme this summer.

Work produced by students at last year’s Summer School, focussing on an item from the Small Press Collection

This year we are taking inspiration from the Slade Small Press project Visions of Protest, which aims to provide a forum to examine the status of contemporary protest in Small Press Publications. UCL Special Collections’ Summer School, Protest in Print, will be a smaller, more compact and easier to access iteration of this.

Protest in Print will offer participants an opportunity to be creative and hands on, applying what they learn about small press publications (such as those in the Little Magazines and Alternative Press collections) archives and rare books in practical ways.  The result will be a public exhibition of their work alongside a display of examples of collection items that have inspired their work in the South Junction Reading Room – watch this space for dates and times!

Shrouds of the Somme
The biggest achievement of the Autumn Term was also undoubtedly our highest profile project to date: working as partners in the Shrouds of the Somme installation at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, alongside other organisations such as the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and the London Legacy Development Corporation.  We delivered an education programme to schools in the Park’s neighbouring boroughs, reaching almost 1000 pupils.   We wrote a blog about this project as part of our department’s Advent Calendar – to read more, click here.

Text by Helen Biggs and Vicky Price.

We can go one better than the traditional ‘ten Lords’ and offer you ‘one royal’…

We’re not going to lie to you, this one is a bit tenuous. But we couldn’t resist the opportunity to share one of our most successful outreach projects to date.

Thousands of children have been involved in an immersive First World War education programme that UCL Special Collections have played a key role in delivering. This was part of the Shrouds of the Somme project, one of the major centrepieces of Armistice commemorations that took place at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park from Thursday 8 to Sunday 18th November this year.

The Shrouds of Somme project is the brainchild of Artist Rob Heard, who has spent the past five years making more than 72,000 small shrouded figures, each one representing one of the men killed and never recovered from the battled field at the Battle of the Somme. On Thursday 8 November, each of the shrouds were laid out as a graphic reminder of the scale of sacrifice they made in the Great War. The installation welcomed just under 3000 school pupils as well as around 85,000 members of the public.

Photographs of the Shrouds of the Somme installation and artist Rob Heard, courtesy of the Shrouds of the Somme.

UCL Special Collections teamed up with the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and UCL Institute of Education’s First World War Centenary Battlefields Tour Programme to create free online teacher resources, worksheets for visiting schools and a programme of workshops for schools in the neighbouring Olympic Park boroughs (Tower Hamlets, Hackney, Waltham Forest and Newham). Special Collection’s Education Coordinator, Vicky Price, delivered 33 workshops, visiting 12 schools and reaching almost 1000 pupils.

Pupils at Randal Cremer Primary School in a workshop delivered by UCL Special Collections.

Resource packs for Shrouds of the Somme workshops.

The workshops combined historical enquiry with creative writing and used primary resources from UCL‘s College archive. Through exploring archival items like Rosenberg’s student record and a publication of perhaps his most famous poem, Break of Day in the Trenches (in Poetry: a magazine of verse. Vol. IX (3), December 1916 [reprint edition, 1966], STORE Little Magazines), pupils learnt of the poet Isaac Rosenberg, who had been a student at the Slade School of Fine Art. He grew up in a Jewish working class family in Mile End and went to art school to become a painter. When war broke out, he volunteered to fight, sending poetry back to the UK from the trenches. He was killed in France in 1918.

But where does the royalty come in? (I hear you say). Well, we were honoured to be invited to attend a visit by The Princess Royal at the installation site. Vicky Price (UCL Special Collections Education Coordinator) shook the Princess’ hand and explained the work we had done alongside pupils and the Head Teacher from the Bobby Moore Academy.

The Princess Royal meets Vicky Price from UCL Special Collections, alonside pupils and Head Teacher Dr Foley from Bobby Moore Academy at the Shrouds of the Somme installation.

Posted on behalf of Adersh Gill – a UCL student volunteer with Special Collections

Volunteering with UCL Archives over the last year has been really enjoyable. I was given the opportunity to improve the archive catalogue on the Santa Rosa Milling Company, a British owned milling company that operated in South American in the late 19^th and 20^th Centuries. The goal of the project was to make it easier for researchers, whose likely focus is on the economic history and development of South America, to gauge whether learning about the Santa Rosa Company’s history would be useful for their work.

The Santa Rosa Milling Company kept extensive documentation and I was asked to improve the archive description for the company’s minute books. The minute books recorded the monthly meetings of the company’s directors. This particular project required someone to be able to summarise the minute books with enough detail to be useful to researchers but not too much that it would take too long to read. Perhaps the main challenge was being able to decipher the hand-writing of the various secretaries recording the meetings, fortunately the archives team were always happy and willing to help whenever I ran into trouble.

The project offered a rare way for a student to learn about the history of South America particularly Chile, using the Santa Rosa Company’s history to gain an insight into the development of the regions. The Santa Rosa Milling Company also offers a case study about an early form of globalization, the company was headquartered in London whilst the majority of company activity occurred in South America; in addition one can learn about the less obvious impacts and ripple effects from the defining historical events of the period through the company’s response to them. The processing of reading through the minute books was in itself a learning experience for me. In particular the company’s post WWII history provides a valuable example of how global companies operated under the Bretton Woods era, when capital flows and currency exchanges were much more tightly regulated. Going through the minute book and seeing how a company on a day-to-day basis had to interact with various regulatory agencies provided a deeper level of understanding for a financial regulatory system which can seem quite abstract when described in a textbook.

Overall the project far exceeded my expectations both in what I expected to learn from it and how enjoyable I found the cataloguing, not to mention how welcoming and nice it was to work with the archives team. This is definitely an activity I would recommend to curious students.

You can find out more about the collection on our online catalogue – search for SANTA ROSA. For more information about using our collections, please see our webpages.

Last week saw UCL Special Collections hold its first Widening Participation Summer School. For four days, a group of twelve 17 year olds from in and around London explored archives, rare books and manuscripts here at UCL, guided by colleagues within Special Collections.

We had brilliant time, and were impressed with the students’ ability to link collection items to areas of their own knowledge and contextual understanding. We also spent a day at The National Archives, visiting their current exhibition, Suffragettes vs. The State, and discussing the notion of authenticity in relation to exhibition interpretation.  The participants then got to work researching collection items from UCL Special Collections, developing interpretation for a public exhibition on the final day.

You can see examples of their work in this video:

We would like to thank everyone at Library Services for accommodating the group, whether that be in the Science Library or the Institute of Education Library, and for Special Collections colleagues who offered their time and expertise.