I loved the Public History event I went to at Ruskin College, so please to see this email come around. Check out Wikipedia description for Public History
Public history is the broad range of activities undertaken by people with some training in the discipline of history who are generally working outside of specialized academic settings. Public history practice is deeply rooted in the areas of historic preservation, archival science, oral history, museum curatorship, and other related fields. The field has become increasingly professionalized in the United States and Canada since the late 1970s. Some of the most common settings for the practice of public history are museums, historic homes and historic sites, parks, battlefields, archives, film and television companies, and all levels of government. Wikipedia
Please note the new venue: The Institute of Archaeology, University College London, 31-34 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PY.
Nearest tube stations are Euston Square (Circle, Hammersmith and City & Metropolitan lines), Euston (Victoria, Northern lines and the overground) and Warren Street (Victoria and Northern lines). There is also disabled badge holders parking immediately outside the front door of the Institute.
Follow the link below for a map of the Institute and public transport guide https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/contact?
Come along for coffee at 11am with the session starting promptly at 11.30. Room 612 on the 6th floor – there are lifts and stairs to all floors. Follow the Public History Group signs on the outer door of the Institute and in the lobby by the lifts.
Historian Ruth Richardson – author of Dickens & the Workhouse: Oliver Twist & the London Poor, The Making of Mr. Gray’s Anatomy andDeath, Dissection & the Destitute – talks about her involvement in a campaign on the streets of London the research processes for which led her to a discovery that was to have a major impact on public history.
Dickens & the Workhouse
Summary: “In 2010 the Outpatients’ block at the Middlesex Hospital was threatened with demolition. The main Hospital had already been reduced to a field-size area of rubble. Local people called on me to help because I had written about a Victorian doctor who had worked in the building when it had been the Strand Union Workhouse. We had 5 weeks to save the building from the bulldozers. Listing had been rejected by the Minister, and there seemed no hope. But fiction came to the rescue, and the building is still standing.
This talk will tell the story of the Workhouse and its eventual listing, and after the talk we can take a walk to see it and its setting.”