This seminar paper forms part of our LGBTQ History Month programming, devised by our LGBTQIA+ Network. To learn more about our Networks and to help shape their future please email diversity@sahgb.org.uk. This talk also forms part of our ongoing seminar series co-supported by the Institute of Historical Research and organised in collaboration with the Oxford Architectural History Seminar. For more information on the series click here. Patrick Preston explores the regeneration of London’s ‘derelict’ docklands, and its queer appropriations by artists in the 1970s.
This seminar explores how queer artists made use of derelict warehouse space in London’s docklands in the 1970s. Butler’s Wharf, at one time a store of colonial commodities and symbol of empire, was also a home and workspace to a number of queer artists such as Derek Jarman throughout the ‘70s. A location for queer experimental films, studio space, and even a site of the Alternative Miss World competition, this talk explores how queer lives and artistic productions have used London’s built environment in surprising ways.
In the 1980s, urban planners sought to develop these warehouses, imagining the luxury homes, shops, and restaurants that have since been realized. Depicting a decayed and wasteful space, these plans overlooked these earlier queer uses. By delving into these archival sources, we can see utopic imaginaries of ideal future living, and nationalist, nostalgic modes of gazing at Britain’s colonial past.
Exploring the history of this building since the 1970s, this seminar considers the effects of regeneration projects on the built environment, and their implications for marginal and LGBTQ+ lives. How does urban ‘regeneration’ tend to figure queer bodies, and their movement through space and time? And how can queer artworks invite alternative ways of moving through, and living in, city space?
Patrick Preston is a researcher with an interest in urban regeneration, and how ideas of decay and gentrification can be usefully explored by looking at queer literature and cultural productions. He recently completed a PhD in English, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, at the University of East Anglia.
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