I am a postgraduate student studying Public History at UCL. This year, I am working with Professor Georgina Brewis from IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society to revise UCL’s campus history walking tour. This tour will highlight the diversity of UCL’s student body across its 200-year history. Funded by a Student Success award won by Georgina and Mike Sulu, the tour will celebrate students’ contributions to the university and wider society while also critically engaging with their legacies.
Telling the stories of alumni from marginalised communities can help students today feel more at home at UCL. Seeing ourselves in our university’s history makes us feel like we not only belong here but can make an impact that reverberates for centuries.
The idea for a revised tour stems from the shortcomings within UCL’s current campus history tour. The tour only scratches the surface, consisting of a handful of fun facts about various famous figures from UCL’s past, many of whom are white and male. It does so without a theme or throughline to carry visitors’ interest and guide their learning. While these figures are worthy of teaching about, the current tour’s lack of detail does little to honour their contributions or scrutinise negative aspects of their actions.
The new tour will incorporate archival research to widen and deepen its coverage of UCL history. For example, the British Library holds the journals of the West African Students’ Union, an influential pan-African organisation co-founded by UCL law student Ladipo Solanke in 1925. This research will help us learn more about prominent figures in UCL’s past and unearth the lesser-known stories of people who have helped make campus what it is today. It is important to honour not only the Nobel Prize winners and heads of state, but also the students and groups whose impacts were felt closer to home.
Why create a tour to share these stories? A campus walking tour enables us to feature diverse stories on a daily basis. Rather than separating these narratives into Black History Month or LGBTQ+ History Month, students and visitors will encounter the lives and experiences of UCL’s diverse alumni across the year.
Alongside revising the walking tour around the Bloomsbury campus, we plan to develop a website with a digital map of the tour. Each pin on the map will open up a story about the place and the people who made their impacts there. Different layers of the map will filter pins according to certain themes, such as Black or queer history at UCL. The virtual element will allow viewers to explore the tour from anywhere, and make their own tour based on the places and stories that most interest them.
As we develop the project, we will consult with current students to hear what they want to see in their campus tour. We will ask the extent to which they feel themselves represented in UCL’s current narrative, and how this tour can deepen their feeling of inclusion and belonging in the university community.
The tour will also incorporate critical engagement with the stories we’re telling. Take the Chōshū Five, for example. They secretly left Japan to become the first Japanese students at UCL when travel abroad was forbidden. The Japanese Garden honours them, and the current tour stops in the garden. The tour script reads, “Of these pioneers, many went on to become leading figures in the establishment of modern Japan… Others became leading figures in the development of Japanese diplomacy, finance and the transport infrastructure.” This narrative elides the fact that “modern Japan” was an era of imperialism, and the Chōshū Five were thus among the architects of imperialist Japan. We can similarly bring a critical eye to the complex legacies of postcolonial leaders who were educated at UCL like Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah.
This tour will join a growing number of “alternative tours” at universities and colleges across Britain and the world. Postgraduate students developed the Uncomfortable Oxford and Uncomfortable Cambridge tours in 2018 and 2022, respectively, to challenge conventional narratives about those universities. Uncomfortable Oxford emerged out of the Rhodes Must Fall movement and broader efforts to highlight Black experiences at Oxford.
But rather than creating an alternative tour running alongside an official tour, our new project will be the university’s main tour, allowing all students and visitors to encounter this diverse history.
Stay tuned for more blog posts as we delve into the archives and build out the new tour. The final product will be launched in June 2024.