A practice-based, multi-purpose space at the heart of the new UCL East campus, dedicated to debate and engagement around key questions of future living and urbanism.
Located at One Pool Street, the public-facing UCL Urban Room hosts events, exhibitions, workshops and engagement with local stakeholders, professional audiences, and the wider public.
Exploring the impact of industry, globalisation, regeneration and gentrification on the six Olympic Park boroughs and their people, UCL Urban Room is a partnership between UCL Urban Laboratory, The Bartlett, School for the Creative and Cultural Industries and UCL Library Services: Special Collections.
The space is designed to create opportunities for academics, students and partners to be exposed to each other's work and initiatives. It operates as a research-led teaching resource for two associated Masters programmes, Urban Lab's Global Urbanism MASc, and Public History MA (UCL History Department), as well as a space for engagement and participation by the wider academic community.
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Past exhibitions
Memory Work
5/07/2024 - 16/08/2024
Connecting researchers and practitioners from acorss UCL, the Memory Work exhibition explored the theme of memory in urban research, and how creative outputs might provide entry-points for understanding the complex evidence of urban investigations.
The exhibition showcased a range of work from members of the Urban Lab Steering Committee, spanning across disciplines, geographies and communities. Contributions came from people working in the fields of urbanism, architecture, geography, political science, planning, critical heritage studies, history and anthropology.
Sonia E. Barrett: Maplective
15/03/2024 - 15/06/2024
In the 'Maplective' exhibition, artist Sonia E. Barrett takes European tools instrumental in creating colonial power, such as desks, maps and cameras, and reconfigures them to do the cultural work they disrupted. Through creative workshops, sculpture, discussion and performance, Sonia worked with local communities in East London to respond to, and co-create, new sculptures that reframe the question: "What was here before?”
Sonia has been working with groups of black and brown women, forming the 'East Bank map-lective', to shred and braid the maps of colonised and post colonised, coloniser and post coloniser territories. Find out more.
Undocumented? Migration on the edges of Europe
30/09/2024 - 29/02/2024
Co-curated by artist and academic Professor Nishat Awan, 'Undocumented?' explores journeys of migration as a series of video installations and situated vignettes from the edges of Europe.
Grounded in original field research, the exhibition traces a route through the borderlands of the 'refugee crisis', narrating stories of migrant journeys and the clandestine crossing of borders. An unfinished and immersive 'Atlas of European Belonging' visualises Europe through its margins and the spaces of transit, movement and stasis produced by those on the move.
In Practice: Student Showcase
06/09/2023 - 28/10/2023
This showcase brings together student work from three postgraduate programmes: Public History, Global Urbanism, and Connected Enviornments. The range of presentations demonstrates their approaches to understanding today's social challenges relating to memory, identity, urban change, and technology.
All three programmes are located in the new UCL East and engage with the context of the area through site-based learning, and collaborations with local oraganisations and communities.
SEEDED residency showcase
01/08/2023 - 19/08/2023
The SEEDED showcase brings together work created during and as a product of residencies as part of East Bank in London College of Fashion and UCL East Urban Room. The four artists have been embedded for five months to allow them to investigate and develop their practice on themes around social practise, activism, collective memory, urbanisation and community engagement.
Audiences can expect to explore ideas of antifascist protest in east London with Mercedes Baptiste Halliday; unethical pay in the east London fashion industry from Toyin Gbomedo; sustainable styling in Easten Eurpean fashion with Noemi Gunea; and Somali identity and poetry with Naajia Ahmed.
Testing Ground: an immersive sound and video exhibition
31/05/2023 - 21/06/2023
An exhibition of visual and sonic installations of contemporary and historic helicopter surveillance over London, Iraq and Belfast. It shows techniques of aerial surveillance that were developed by the British Army over Belfast during the 30 year conflict - the so-called Troubles – these have now been adapted by the National Police Air Service for use over London and other UK mainland cities. This exhibition, derived from a project conceived by Henrietta Williams and Merijn Royaards, interweaves archival material gathered from the Imperial War Museum’s Northern Ireland Collection against contemporaneous video footage and sonic field recordings of helicopter surveillance at moments of protest in London.
Navigating the System: A Boater Healthcare Exhibition
24/03/2023 – 29/04/2023
Navigating the System is a co-curated exhibition about London’s boater community and difficulties they face accessing healthcare, told through photographs by photojournalist Caitlin Vinicombe and testimonial accounts documented in research by Joseph Cook and Nura Ali.
- Read the Q&A with Joseph Cook and Nura Ali
SE1 Stories: Community action in a London neighbourhood
19/01/2023 – 03/03/2023
SE1 Stories is a public history exhibition tracing four decades of community action, starting in Blackfriars in the 1970s. The exhibition has been created from a collection of thousands of photographs, and archives including the SE1 Newspaper publication that was produced from 1975-1991
Selected images from the SE1 exhibition courtesy of Paul Carter