Cultures of London Course Descriptor

Course Overview

Cultures of London is an interdisciplinary course that examines the material and conceptual realities of the city. The course spans five centuries from 1600 to the present, and is organised around four key themes: “History & Economics”, “Literature & Culture”, “Identity & Community” and “Environment”. Each class addresses one or more of these themes, and asks students to examine London’s cultures from various perspectives. Culture, of course, means literature, painting and film, artistic forms that will be discussed in-depth throughout the course; but it also means commercial regulations, social policies and urban infrastructure. Culture is what we live with, and very often it is hidden in plain sight.

Course Aims

This course aims to:

• Give students a basic understanding of the history of London from 1600 to the present.
• Develop students’ skills in cultural interpretation across a range of forms and genres.
• Introduce students to the development of London’s cultures and how they have been informed by the changing politics of race, gender, sexuality and class.

Learning Outcomes

On successful completion of the course, students will be able to:

Knowledge and Understanding

Subject Specific Skills

Transferable and Employability Skills

Teaching and Learning

Teaching and learning strategies for this course will include: 

A minimum of 36 contact hours, typically to include interactive group teaching, co-curriculars, individual meetings, and in-class presentations and exams.

Course information and supplementary materials are available on the University’s Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).

Students will receive individualised developmental feedback on their work for this course.

Students are required to attend and participate in all the formal and timetabled sessions for this course. Students are also expected to manage their directed learning and independent study in support of the course.

Assessment

Formative

Students will be formatively assessed in class through class activities, and during office hours. Formative assessments are ones that do not count towards the final grade but will provide students with developmental feedback.

Summative

Further information on the structure of summative assessment elements can be found in the Summative Assessment Briefs.

Feedback

Students will receive feedback in a variety of ways: written (including via email correspondence); oral (within office hours or on an ad hoc basis) and indirectly through class discussion.

Feedback on examinations is provided through generic internal examiners’ reports and are made available to the student on the VLE. For all other summative assessment methods, feedback is made available to the student either via email, the VLE or another appropriate method.   

Indicative Reading

Note: Comprehensive and current reading lists for courses are produced annually in the Course Syllabus or other documentation provided to students; the indicative reading list provided below is used as part of the approval/modification process only.

Books 

Bowen, Elizabeth, The Demon Lover and Other Stories (London: Jonathan Cape, 1945)

Mayhew, Henry, London Labour and the London Poor: A Selected Edition, ed. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)

Selvon, Sam, The Lonely Londoners, ed. Susheila Nasta (London: Penguin, 2006)

Shakespeare, William, The Tempest, ed. David Lindley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)

Ackroyd, Peter, London: A Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000)

King, Anthony D., ‘Re-presenting World Cities: Cultural Theory/Social Practice’, World Cities in a World-System, eds Paul L. Knox and Peter J. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)

McLeod, John, Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (London: Routledge, 2004)

Journals

Literary London Journal

London Journal: A Review of Metropolitan Society Past and Present

Electronic Resources

Layers of London. Available on: https://www.layersoflondon.org/

Mapping Black London in World War II. Available on: https://dcrn.northeastern.edu/

Bomb Sight: Mapping the WWII Bomb Census, Available on: https://bombsight.org

Indicative Topics

Students will typically study the following topics: 

• Early Modern London
• Eighteenth-century London
• Victorian London
• Wartime London
• Postcolonial London
• London on Film
• Literature of London
• London and Visual Culture