Over the 2023/24 academic year, I conducted research for an updated campus history tour as part of the wider Generation UCL project, funded by UCL Student Success Fund and UCL's Contribution and Engagement Fund. This has been a very rewarding experience and I have learned a lot about UCL’s history and the importance of walking tours for sharing more diverse stories of the past.
On 12 June 2024, we publicly launched the tour during an event entitled ‘Where do we think we are? Diverse trails and tales of historic Bloomsbury.’ We led about fifty attendees on four staggered tours and then hosted a panel discussion to explore the aims and purposes of historical walking tours, and to think about how and why such tours might centre reparative, radical, diverse or decolonial voices. I led one of the tours and then presented about my research process. Other members of the panel were Dr Toyin Agbetu, Professor Bob Mills, Dr Gabe Moshenska, and Tony Warner (founder of Black History Walks). Subhadara Das moderated the discussion.
It was very meaningful to present the tour to such a large and engaged audience at this event, and the experience highlighted that walking tours are impactful not just because of the content that they share but also because they bring people together to learn from and with each other.
After the event 34 attendees completed a survey about the tour. The most common words they used to describe how they felt about the tour were ‘informative,’ ‘interesting,’ ‘inspired,’ and ‘engaged.’ Common themes emerged from respondents’ longer reflections about what they enjoyed. Attendees appreciated that the tour focused on diverse and underrepresented people in UCL’s past without being ‘tokenistic.’ One described the tour as a ‘refreshingly honest account of UCL, that champions its disruptive character without whitewashing troubling, unethical aspects of its past.’ Attendees also enjoyed the pace of the tour, which allowed time for questions and fostered a ‘sense of community by the gathering (walk + panel).’
When I started working on this project a year ago, I hoped that a revised tour would have this effect by including more stories from UCL’s past that better reflect the diversity of both past and present students and staff. I’ll highlight a few of the additions to the tour that demonstrate this.
The revised tour follows the same route as the original campus history tour, with edits to the script at each stop and one replacement stop: instead of stopping at the Institute of Making, the revised tour stops at Gordon Square to talk about Elsa Goveia, a Guyanese historian who excelled as a History undergraduate at UCL in the 1940s before making significant contributions to Caribbean historiography at the University College of the West Indies. I wrote about Goveia in a blog post during Black History Month in October 2023.
Besides the new Gordon Square stop, the new tour uses the same locations with additional information. For example, while the original tour only discusses the architectural history and general information about the Cruciform Building, the revised tour tells the story of Cecil Belfield Clarke, one of Britain’s first Black doctors. Originally from Barbados, Clarke studied at St Catherine’s College, Cambridge before training at University College Hospital. He discovered the formula still used to determine safe dosages for children, helped found the League of Coloured Peoples, and was out within his community. Letters from W.E.B. Du Bois greeted Clarke and his partner Pat Walter as a couple.
At the Darwin Building stop, the new tour talks about a few of the notable buildings that used to exist along Gower Street, such as the Indian Student Hostel, whose prominent visitors included Mahatma Gandhi in 1931, and China House, which provided community for Chinese students from its opening in 1933.
This approach seems to have resonated with participants. One survey respondent wrote that they were ‘surprised that the tour route was almost the same as the mainstream UCL tour, which highlighted just how much the original missed and how much it gained from its adaptation.’
Looking back on the entirety of the project, I have appreciated moving from the research to presentation phases of creating the tour. From many hours spent in the Special Collections reading room to leading practice tours and refining the script in the spring to presenting the final version in June, I have felt more connected to the UCL community through this project. As an MA Public History student, I feel grateful to have had the opportunity to put my studies into practice.
The last stage of the project is creating a Memory Map of UCL. PhD student Montaz Marché is leading this aspect of the project. The Memory Map is an overlaid set of historical maps of UCL with pins for various places, people, and organisations. The locations are sorted into themes and tags, allowing viewers to filter and explore different aspects of UCL’s history, such as student life, Black history, LGBTQ+ history, women’s history and much more. The Memory Map will enable us to feature more parts of UCL’s history than can fit on a walking tour. The map also incorporates previous research and walking tours such as the 2018 Bricks + Mortals trail created by Subhadra Das. As an ongoing project, it will provide an interactive and extensive exploration of UCL’s history. Keep an eye out for the completed Memory Map!