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School for the Creative and Cultural Industries

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Spaces and Facilities

Based at UCL East in Stratford, East London and spread over two buildings (One Pool Street and Marshgate), the School for the Creative and Cultural Industries is home to many specialist facilities to support practice-based research and teaching in the arts, humanities and social sciences, from media and conservation labs to studio and exhibition spaces.

The Culture Lab
A woman stands smiling by a glass case at an exhibition - photo taken at the Curating Power opening in the Culture Lab

Located at Marshgate, UCL East, the Culture Lab builds on UCL’s long tradition of object-based learning and collections-based research. It’s a space for students, artists and community groups to work with collections and archives to creatively share with each other and the public what matters to them through teaching, exhibitions and events.

UCL Urban Room
Photo of the outside of the Urban Room which is filled with people looking at an exhibition. Photo taken at the opening of the Memory Work exhibition

UCL Urban Room is a practice-based, public-facing space dedicated to debate and engagement around key questions of future living in relation to urbanism.

The Urban Room is an experimental exhibition space for students, researchers, artists, and community members, hosting events, exhibitions, workshops and engagement with local stakeholders, professional audiences, and the wider public.

Memory Workshop and Memory Bike 
Photo of the Memory Bike - a cargo bike with UCL branding in front of large orange UCL letters

The Memory Workshop is a centre for public-facing history teaching and research, and provides access to UCL’s Special Collections including the social history of London.

The Memory Bike is a portable, bicycle-mounted recording and listening station and digital acoustic archive which supports the documentation and recording of local voices and everyday soundscapes. 

Media Studio
Two people sit in front of a screen in a dark editing room

The Media Production Studios at UCL East are a suite of facilities to support audio-visual production, editing, and imaging/digital media facilities, including black box media prototyping space.

Our facilities support teaching in creative documentary and fiction filmmaking, games design and AR/VR, as well as immersive sound design and storytelling for radio and podcasts.

Community Cinema
A cinema with rows of red seats, the UCL logo is on the cinema screen

The 160 seat cinema at One Pool Street, UCL East supports teaching and provides a community cinema programme, including the quarterly SCCI Cinema Club. SCCI Cinema Club is a series of free screenings, sharing the films that have inspired and influenced researchers, artists, and practitioners across our creative community. 

Close up of chalk pastels in box
Slade Studio

The Slade Studio is a flexible art studio space at UCL East. It is used by undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, for partnership meetings and events, and for outreach activity such as the Art & Design Saturday Club which aims to encourage local school children to improve their creative skills. The Studio will host the Art & Technology BA from UCL’s world-leading Slade School of Fine Art a course for a new generation of artists to create art connected to emerging and disruptive technologies.

A woman restoring artwork
Conservation Laboratory and Media Conservation Studio

The Media Conservation Studio is one of two unique spaces at UCL East supporting teaching and world class research in the Conservation of Contemporary Art and Media MSc. 

Since the 1960s artists from around the world have increasingly used a range of different analogue and digital media in the making of their art, including film, 35mm slides, video, audio, and software. This studio is dedicated to the conservation and technical exploration of these artworks and the media they employ.

Responding to urgent conservation challenges presented by growing collections of this important part of our contemporary heritage, the Media Conservation Studio houses specialist equipment to support the analysis and digitisation of obsolete tape-based video such as VHS, U-Matic, Betacam, and DVCAM, and optical media such as LaserDisc and DVD, as well as enabling the examination and transcoding of contemporary file-based video formats.The studio also supports advanced research in the conservation of software-based artworks, meeting the needs of artworks incorporating new technologies such as game engines and artificial intelligence.