Students' Association

History Department Mural

…history through corridors…
Stephen Spender

A combination of fifteen metres of calico, thirty-six metres of tape, twenty paintbrushes, thirty bottles of paint, six lecturers and roughly one hundred students brought about a riot of colour on the normally dull walls of the history department. In the space of a week, both the department's corridors and image underwent a radical make-over, as students and lecturers painted slogans and pictures representing what they thought constituted the discipline of history. The result is a vibrant collection of quotations (from various sources; Henry Ford to Karl Marx, Gladiator to Wittgenstein), questions, commentary on the department and on recent world events, portraits, illustrations, flags, jokes and ideas. It is, indeed, a highly personal experience of history.

The idea was formulated by the history society in an attempt not only to revamp the history department's decidedly dusty corridors, but also to allow students to get to know the department and its lecturers better and, moreover, to gain a deeper appreciation of the subject. This is brilliantly represented on the metres of calico taped onto the corridors of the building; so much so, in fact, that we intend upon using the mural on the university's open day on 27 March. Possibly, what made this project (the society's first this year) so successful was that it was as much of a creative exercise as an intellectual one and proved that history is, in fact, quite a lot of fun.

Sarah Duff