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Unofficial Histories 2

I read in the paper today that, for television execs at least, history is the new gardening. I’m neither a historian nor a gardener but, in common I suspect with the majority of the population who could, I did spend the weekend in mine. Particularly welcome after the previous weekend’s conference … energising and fascinating but loafing around in the garden is something else.

I’m not often surrounded by historians, more usually architects and writers of various stripes (see Spatial Perspectives below, and above to come). The organisers presented a truly diverse set of panels, from community archives to squatting to TW3 to smoking. The presentation which were particular highlights for me included David Ellis (‘Taking Control of the Past: Grassroots Activism, the Academy and the Community History Movement in Urban Britain, 1970–1990′); Hilda Kean (‘Critical Public Histories: the role of public historians in the social construction of knowledge’ and really interesting website); Katy Beinart (‘Market Research (or) Unravelling the Idealized Specter – artists producing history in the public realm’; and Catherine Feely (‘From Dialectics to Dancing: Reading, Writing and the Experience of Everyday Life in the Diaries of Frank P. Forster, 1934-8′).

It wasn’t just the subject matter and the approaches that were diverse, the forms of presentation were too. So I must give special mention to the opening act or performance lecture as it was billed by Amelia Beavis Harrison & Alan Armstrong: ‘19th May’.

David Ellis talking about community publishing in Centerprise in Hackney, round the corner from where I used to live, reminded me of a whole sector of co-operative publishing and printing that’s largely disappeared. I worked as part of this in the long-defunct Women in Print, an offset litho printing co-op. Katy Beinart has to take the lifetime prize for commitment to research in travelling from South Africa to the UK in a cargo steamer, replicating the journey her ancestors made. This was in the course of her Market project (Brixton market: ‘Memories for Salt’) involving the wonderful-sounding Memory Preservation Salt.

I’m still catching up on follow-on references, looking up books that other participants mentioned and all the usual post-conference processing. More to come.

Conference report: unofficial histories

Fascinating and diverse, great location too at Bishopsgate Institute – and shame on me for having never been there before despite having lived in Hackney for 30 years. Will follow this with a longer post with some highlights and observations soonest.

You can read all the abstracts and bios here: http://unofficialhistories.wordpress.com/2012-2/

Coming This Summer

Two good things on the horizon:

I’m going to be presenting a  paper ‘The View from the Threshold: Writing the House at 2 Ennerdale Drive’ at the Spatial Perspectives conference at Oxford University on 22 June. You can read the blog.

The book-of-the-conference Writing Urban Space, edited by Liam Bell and Gavin Goodwin of Surrey University, who organised the conference in 2010, will be published on 27 July. The book is published by Zer0 Books and includes my piece ‘Interstitial Practices and 2 Ennerdale Drive: unauthorised biography’.

Teaching Year

It’s only the beginning of spring (hurrah!) and already the teaching year is done. Maybe because I’m such a novice at this still but the process is really fascinating, from planning and delivery to marking. Yes, marking … which I ‘co’ did with my colleagues, all very scientific (well, certainly very thoughtful in process). And amazing to see how quickly students develop and ‘get’ stuff.

The week is good …

And you can see/hear me at the Unofficial Histories Conference at the Bishopsgate Institute on Saturday 19 May. Title of my paper is: ‘Poetics of the Ordinary’: Writing 2 Ennerdale Drive: unauthorised biography

Read me on Review31

‘A Babble of Allusions’, my review of Writing the Modern City: Literature, architecture, modernity, edited by Sarah Edwards and Jonathan Charley, is up now at http://review31.co.uk/article/view/26/a-babble-of-allusions

It’s not the ‘book-of-the-conference’ but it did come from the architexture conference at Strathclyde University that I presented at in 2008. It was the first time I’d presented on Ennerdale Drive and I remember that finishing the book seemed a very long way off at that point, yet it was contracted in autumn 2009, delivered the following February and published in 2011.

Reading the essays reminded me what a buzz I got from the conference: a huge diversity of interests and, apparently, a space existed that was a good fit for my work and me.

Spatial Perspectives and Unofficial Histories

No conferences beckoning for ages and then two come along at once.

Unofficial Histories is about how ‘society produces, presents and consumes history beyond official and elite versions of the past, at Bishopsgate Institute in London on 19 May.

Spatial Perspectives: Literature and Architecture 1850–present is ‘the first conference to examine the intersections of architecture and literature globally over a broad timeframe’, at University of Oxford on 22 June. Which is quite a claim …

Anyway, both of these sound fascinating.