On 12 June the Generation UCL project presented a revised and updated history walking tour of UCL’s Bloomsbury campus. Funded by two UCL EDI funds Student Success Fund and Contribution and Engagement Fund, we have been working over the past year to propose some alterations to UCL’s official history walking tour to reflect more diverse stories of students and staff.
The new tour keeps the original route and much of the existing content but also adds in lesser-told stories of students and alumni. These include the pioneering health care and pan-African activism of Cecil Belfield Clarke, one of Britain’s first Black doctors; UCL’s role in advancing gay rights through Jamie Gardiner’s formation of one of the first university gay societies in the early 1970s; the 1933 opening of China House in Gower Street as a community centre for the Central Union of Chinese Students; and the role of PhD student and Black activist Altheia Jones-Lecointe who made legal history as part of the Mangrove Nine case in 1970, which promoted the first judicial acknowledgement of ‘evidence of racial hatred’ by the Metropolitan Police.
The revised tour was researched and written by Marshall Scholar Julia Chaffers who has been working with me, Mike Sulu (Co-Chair UCL Race Equality Steering Group) and external consultant Subhadra Das on this project. On 12 June we ran the tour four times as part of a bigger event exploring the aim and purpose of historical walking tours, called ‘Where do we think we are? Diverse trails and tours of historic Bloomsbury’. After the tours Subhadra Das chaired a panel discussion featuring Julia Chaffers alongside Dr Toyin Agbetu (UCL Anthropology), Professor Bob Mills (UCL History of Art and creator of Hide and Seek: A Queer Tour of Bloomsbury), Dr Gabe Moshenska (UCL Institute of Archaeology and creator of Bombsites of Bloomsbury walking tour) and Tony Warner (Founder of Black History Walks). We considered how institutions choose to remember and relate their histories and explored how and why such tours might centre reparative, radical, diverse or decolonial voices.
Feedback from attendees suggests they valued the chance to hear about figures and events that are not often spoken about, and participants called for even longer tours (!), with more stories and also asked for new signage around campus that would mark these histories. The project has also commissioned a Memory Mapfrom colleagues in the Bartlett that will form a permanent online home for our new research as well as the work of the many UCL colleagues who have created previous tours. Some of these stories are already shared in our Octagon exhibition, where for example you can hear Jamie Gardiner recall founding GaySoc on UCL’s SoundCloud.
Reflecting on the event, Subhadra Das, author of the recently published Uncivilised: 10 Lies That Made The West, said ‘The joy of this new tour is that it celebrates the history of UCL by bringing to the fore stories of lesser known people and places that made up our community. It represents an important step towards the university being an inclusive place for everyone.’