CONSTRUCTING COLONIALITY: BRITISH IMPERIALISM AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT (REGISTRATIONS CLOSED)
Registrations are now closed for this three-day conference, hosted by The Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain (SAHGB) in collaboration with UCL and the London School of Architecture. Discounted places are available for SAHGB members, students, and staff members of UCL and the LSA.
We look forward to meeting delegates and speakers who have registered for this event. Please look out for welcome emails from your conference organisers.
The conference takes as its theme the coloniality of architecture and heritage in relation to the British Empire, from the early years of expansionism and the escalation of the slave trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, through the physical and political force wielded in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the development of racial capitalism, to the subsequent and ongoing struggles for independence, freedom and justice.
Note - May 2023 - Public Transport in London: As train strike dates have now been announced, which may affect travel to some extent, we recommend checking up-to-date timetables from your own operator before you travel, exploring alternative methods if possible, and checking national information
The Destruction of the Roehampton Estate in the Parish of St. James's in January 1832, 1833 (hand coloured litho)
Creator: Adolphe Duperly (1801-65) | Credit: Photo © Christie's Images / Bridgeman Images
Full programme:
Note - May 2023 - Public Transport in London: As train strike dates have now been announced close to the conference dates, which may affect travel to some extent, we recommend checking up-to-date travel timetables from your own operator before you travel, and national information
PRE-CONFERENCE KEYNOTE LECTURE: Thursday, 11th May 2023
18.00–19.00 Drinks reception in the foyer of the Bartlett School of Architecture
19.00-20.30 Nnamdi ELLEH:
Decolonizing Decolonisation: Ideological Continuity and Discontinuity in Colonial and Postcolonial Imaginations of Modernity
DAY 1: Friday, 12th May 2023
9.30 – 10.00 Greeting by Prof Elizabeth McKellar, President of SAHGB
Followed by Opening Remarks by Dr Eva Branscome
10.00 - 12.30 Session 1: The ARCHITECTURAL GRASP
Chair: Elizabeth McKELLAR
10.00 Chair's Introduction
10.10 Ireland as an experimental ground for British architecture
Murray FRASER
10.30 “Yon Empress of the North”: Edinburgh’s New Town as a city of Empire
Amy ORNER
10.50 Colonial inspirations, regional development: The case of Baroda state, British India
Karan RANE
11.10 Professional entanglements: British colonial networks of architecture
Soon-Tzu SPEECHLEY + Julie WILLIS
11.30 Fictional Functional Reports: Inhabiting the gaps of environmental reports at KNUST’s Faculty of
Architecture, 1963-2023
Albert BRENCHAT-AGUILAR + Ato JACKSON
11.50 Questions & Discussion
12.30 - 14.00 Lunch Break
14.00 - 16.00 Session 2: MILITARIZED SPACES OF EMPIRE
Chair: : Megha CHAND INGLIS
14.00 Chair's Introduction
14.10 Tai Ping Shan’s spatial injustice: Colonial Hong Kong during the 1894 bubonic plague
Jasmine CHAN + Patrick CHIU + Patrick HWAN
14.30 The police building as image: Station architecture in British Colonial India
Mira Rai WAITS
14.50 Colonial legacy and state building in Palestine: Architectural investigation
Anwar JABER
15.10 Legacies of violence and trauma: Covert surveillance during Belfast’s “Troubles” and Kenya’s
“Mau Mau Uprising”
Karin ELLIOTT
15.30 Questions & Discussion
16.00 - 16.30 Tea Break
16.30 - 18.30 Session 3: NETWORKS OF TRADE AND INDUSTRY
Chair: Nnamdi ELLEH
16.30 Chair's Introduction
16.40 Military ports and trading forts of Konkan: Geospatial analysis of architectural evidence of
European expansionism from the 16th to 18th Centuries
Mrudula MANE + Pushkar SOHONI
17.00 Telegraphy and financial sovereignty at the India Office
Matthew WELLS
17.20 The architecture of industrial crops production and extraction: Lever Brothers’ intercolonial and
trans-imperial networks of industrialisation in Africa
Michele TENZON
17.40 “Save our statues”: The attempt to relocate a Cambridge chapel memorial to an investor in the slave trade slave trade and what happened next
Veronique MOTTIER
18.00 Questions & Discussion
18.30 Finish
DAY 2: Saturday, 13th May 2023
10.00 - 12.30 Session 4: OBJECTIVES OF EMPIRE
Chair: Neal SHASORE
10.00 Chair's Introduction
10.10 A crimson thread? The cumulative effects of race, nation and empire in British architectural
discourse, c.1850-1920
Alex BREMNER
10.30 Buildings and blueprints: Knowledge, power and colonization
Vimalin RUJIVACHARAKUL
10.50 A King, a Queen, and a statue in-between: Stabilizing colonial instability in Bangalore
Sonali DHANPAL
11.10 Fields architecture: The central farm and the production of colonial knowledge in Canada, 1889–
1939
Émélie DESROCHERS-TURGEON
11.30 From the National Gallery to the world: Museum climate as British Standard
Nushelle DE SILVA
11.50 Questions & Discussion
12.30 - 13.30 Lunch Break
13.30 - 16.00 Session 5: INFRASTRUCTURES OF LIFE AND LAND
Chair: Vimalin RUJIVACHARAKUL
13.30 Chair's Introduction
13.40 A bittersweet heritage: Slavery, architecture and the British landscape
Victoria PERRY
14.00 Schooling the Mufassal: Educational space in small-town Bengal, Colonial India
Tania SENGUPTA
14.20 Developing capable women: Coloniality, landscape and post-war reconstruction in Britain and
abroad
Camilla ALLEN + Luca CSEPELY-KNORR
14.40 Ecologies of vulnerability: Post-cyclone reconstruction in Mauritius, 1945
Alistair CARTWRIGHT
15.00 The “Bod Ose” & Krio architecture story telling the history of a tribe
Bijou HARDING
15.20 Questions & Discussion
16.00 - 16.30 Tea Break
16.30 - 19.00 Session 6: POSTCOLONIALISM AND ITS HERITAGE
Chair: Eva BRANSCOME
16.30 Chair's Introduction
16.50 “Not in the usual sense”: Anthony D King and the origins of critical colonial architectural history
Mark CRINSON
17.10 The traces of imperialism in Nigerian architecture
Ola UDUKU
17.30 Building a “Little England”: Architectural legacies and postcolonial conversions in a case
study from Barbados
Anna BISHOP + Niall FINNERAN
17.50 The Georgian isles: Angus Acworth’s heritage legislation in Jamaica and England
Sean KETTERINGHAM
18.10 Coloniality and the Politicisation of Literary Heritage Conservation
Alan CHANDLER + Caroline WATKINSON
18.30 Questions & Discussion
19.00 – 19.10 Break
19.10 – 19.30 Conference summation by Dr Neal Shasore
19.30 Finish
DAY 3: Sunday, 14th May 2023
10.00 - 12.00 STUDY TOURS
Tour 1: Heart of Empire?
This walking tour is about rediscovering the traces of the British colonial slave trade in the City of London – as the financial centre of Empire - as they are inscribed into the urban fabric. The money harvested through this form of exploitation starting in the C16 was a key component of the capitalist structures that became enacted by these buildings. Within the City of London this very particular urban environment arguably perpetuates the resulting systemic inequalities even today. As the City continues to rebuild itself this capital is reinvested, and the traces become ever more obscure. Some have disappeared altogether, but if we learn how to re-read them again through buildings, their sculptural ornamentation, the names of pubs as well as those of streets, the transatlantic trade with human beings becomes again apparent and is everywhere.
Dr Eva Branscome is an Associate Professor at UCL’s Bartlett School of Architecture. Originally trained as an interior architect, her research work follows two strands: the links between built heritage and cultural practices in contemporary cities, and the modern architectural history of Central Europe. She is the author of Hans Hollein and Postmodernism (2018), the first major monograph on that Austrian architect-artist.
Tour 2: Ebb and flow of Empire: Tracing coloniality along the Thames
Starting at Somerset House on the Strand and ending in the rebranded ‘Royal Greenwich’, this tour will use our route down the river by boat as a way to trace and interrogate the impact of imperial expansion, exploitation and extraction on London from the seventeenth century onwards, in the form of landmark buildings and monuments, in the city’s urban development, and in the nature of the Thames itself. We will consider the ways in which architectural projects of different kinds – and their representation – manifested and communicated the empire to Londoners and visitors to the capital, as well as contemporary approaches to dealing with their difficult legacies. NB This tour will last 3-4 hours, but with opportunities to disembark and continue alone! The boat fare is funded by the Survey of London, but you will need to make your own way back from Greenwich (very easy on the DLR or mainline railway).
Dr Emily Mann is Associate Professor of architectural history, race and spatial justice at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, where she is a member of the Survey of London team. She previously taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she introduced the MA in ‘Architectures of Empire: Contested Spaces and their Legacies’.
Tour 3: End of Empire: The Americanising of Mayfair, c. 1900–1970
The decline of the British Empire from the late-19th century was accelerated by – and at least partially caused by – the rapid emergence of the United States of America as the wealthiest and most powerful capitalist nation. By around 1900, surplus capital in the USA was already finding its home in the hitherto predominant nation of Britain, a country with whom of course the US shared strong ethnic, economic, social and cultural links. This walking tour retraces the impact of US capital and culture on London’s wealthiest district during the twentieth century, with Mayfair being steadily transformed into a de facto ‘American Quarter’. Highlights range from Selfridges department store through to the Hilton Hotel, taking in along the way Eero Saarinen’s former US Embassy and other significant examples.
Prof Murray Fraser is Professor of Architecture and Global Culture at the Bartlett and a former SAHGB Chair. His book Architecture and the 'Special Relationship' (2007) won the RIBA Research Award and Zevi Book Prize. He edited the 21st Edition of Sir Banister Fletcher’s Global History of Architecture (2020), awarded the Colvin Prize.
Tour 4: The Sanatan Hindu Mandir, Alperton (2010): Belonging, temple building and the transnational process
Our visit will focus on the transnational alliance between East African Indian communities forced to migrate to the UK in the 1970s, families of hereditary temple builders operating out of India, and British architects and engineers performing the role of ‘translators’, in the realisation of the Sanatan Hindu Mandir in Alperton. Inaugurated in 2010, the process of design, off-site production, and assembly of this hand-carved load bearing stone temple reveals a creative pulling together of ritualised building knowledges, colonial archaeology, modern technologies, and new ‘diasporic’ spatial imaginaries. While these conjunctures disrupt colonial epistemologies in profound ways, they also prompt broader questions about a crisis in production and the very imagination of the Indian temple in modern architectural history.
Dr Megha Chand Inglis is Associate Professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture. Her research is focussed on Indian hereditary temple builders and their lived experience of design, production, and architectural history in colonial, postcolonial and diasporic contexts. Megha recently co-curated a special issue of the journal ARQ - on the Indian temple and modernity - and is currently working on a book on the Sompura temple builders of western India.
The conference organisers are Dr Eva Branscome (Bartlett School of Architecture) and Dr Neal Shasore (London School of Architecture), with advice from an International Academic Committee.