Moving Words

“Cheerless and drab but ‘full of amazing stuff’. The British Library Newspapers collection at Colindale is moving and also becoming increasingly digitised. Huw Richards wonders if researchers will miss the feel of the paper beneath their fingers

// The journey to the far reaches of the Northern Line’s Edgware branch always did feel rather like time travel – an impression accentuated about 20 years ago when London Underground managers admitted that, on the “next train” indicators on that creaky, rattling stretch of line, one minute really was longer than 60 seconds.

Head out of the Tube station, cross the road and there stands the 1930s blockhouse that houses British Library Newspapers, known simply to its users as Colindale. There can be few historians, at least those concerned with the history of modern Britain, who have not made that journey. For many doctoral students it was the foundation of their research, requiring months of sustained attention to bound volumes and microfilm.

Not, however, for much longer. The announcement in mid-October of a £33 million capital grant, part of a government package for the cultural and creative industries, was Colindale’s death sentence. The hard copies – a collection estimated to total 750 million newspaper pages – will go to a new, purpose-built facility at Boston Spa in Yorkshire, while the 400,000 reels of micro-film and digital access will move to join the rest of the British Library at St Pancras, nine stops and 26 minutes down the Northern Line.”

Read full story. I spent MANY HOURS in Colindale researching material for my PhD

Reinventing the Past

We bring home mementoes because we want a tangible memory of a time or place. Ulrike Zitzlsperger ponders souvenirs and how they reshape history

// It is instructive to explore souvenir shops. The souvenirs I have in mind are not those items that can be found everywhere and that have no genuine link to a particular place; things that are made in bulk and simply adapted slightly to fit the location in which they are being sold. The souvenirs that nobody you know would ever really buy, but they do, of course, sell: the little plastic televisions with a number of popular images to click through, all-black postcards of a city at night, dolls in costume, T-shirts with local images that you last saw worn at the airport. The more up-to-date range includes postcards that allow you to rebuild famous monuments, bottle openers in the shape of certain sights, regional versions of Monopoly or notebooks with town plans and index stickers – the last a nod towards the contemporary city dweller who has fallen in love with a metropolis. Souvenirs are a major industry and an important aspect of popular culture. After all, even the philosopher Walter Benjamin appreciated snow globes.

Read full story, and see my piece of travel writing on finding a Souvenir of St Ives.

Past Mistakes

“Whatever the genuine lessons of history, policymakers constantly make opportunistic use of the past to justify their decisions. Matthew Reisz introduces a team of historians who are fighting back against the ‘Bad History’ all around us.

Like everybody else, historians disagree violently about “the lessons of history”. Some think there aren’t any. And even among those who believe that the past is clearly relevant to the present, many are scrupulous about letting other people draw their own moral lessons. Others are happy to state, and underline, what the lessons are.

Take Vic Gatrell’s City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (2006), which won the prestigious Wolfson History Prize. The book is a study of the satirical prints, many of them gleefully lavatorial or obscene, that poured from the presses in the late 18th century.

They eventually faded away around 1820 as “respectability” set in: in Lord Byron’s words, “the age of cant” replaced “the age of cunt”. As the author notes, it is an intriguing, perhaps significant if little-remarked fact that “no Victorian produced an image of Queen Victoria farting”.

It would be possible to tell this story in fairly neutral terms. We could enjoy the social history, the dirty pictures and Gatrell’s expert elucidation of their imagery, while left free to decide for ourselves whether the shift in sensibility he describes was a good thing, a bad thing, a mixed blessing or a matter of complete indifference to us.

But Gatrell, professor of history at the University of Essex, doesn’t go in for such neutrality. He constantly buttonholes his readers, celebrating the prints’ scenes of brawling, drunkenness and low-life pleasure, and launching broadsides against piety, puritanism and political correctness.

He makes it abundantly clear that he believes the attitude of total disrespect towards authority is something we should learn from. His subject may sound fairly obscure, but he is not going to let us forget that it has huge implications for a number of ongoing debates.

Many historians, of course, explore topics far more obviously contentious and emotionally charged than late-18th-century satire. So how far do they see themselves as directly useful, offering us insights that can help us face contemporary challenges and lead better lives?”

Read full story in the Times Higher Education.

Past Mistakes

“Whatever the genuine lessons of history, policymakers constantly make opportunistic use of the past to justify their decisions. Matthew Reisz introduces a team of historians who are fighting back against the ‘Bad History’ all around us

Like everybody else, historians disagree violently about “the lessons of history”. Some think there aren’t any. And even among those who believe that the past is clearly relevant to the present, many are scrupulous about letting other people draw their own moral lessons. Others are happy to state, and underline, what the lessons are.”

Read full story and visit History and Policy.