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A practice-based, multi-purpose space at the heart of the UCL East campus, dedicated to debate and engagement around key questions of future living and urbanism.
Located in Stratford at the UCL East Campus, the Urban Room is an experimental exhibition space for students, researchers, artists, and community members. Based on the idea of an ‘urban room’ as a forum for community-based debate and dialogue, the UCL Urban room brings together academic research and lived experiences of city residents to inspire meaningful education for our students and visitors. Users of the urban room are invited to join a dynamic network of practice focused on issues of global urbanism, heritage, arts, and social history. The space is equipped with oral history recording and archiving capabilities through its initiative of a Memory Workshop. Together, the Urban Room and Memory Workshop are supported by The Bartlett Faculty of Built Environment and the School for Creative and Cultural Industries at the University College London.
What's on in the Urban Room?
- Global Urbanism MASc
- Public History MA
- Community led exhibitions
- Curated conversations
Current exhibition
Coming soon:
Summer Flowers – Wolff Architects Exhibition
30 January – 26 May 2025
Urban Room and Wolff Architects celebrate the work of South African author Bessie Head. The exhibition is an invitation to listen, read and be immersed in the ideas of emancipatory spatial practices.
Volunteer
Volunteer opportunities with UCL Urban Room
Gain hands-on experience invigilating exhibitions, and planning and assisting events!
If this interests you, please complete this short form. There is no deadline for applications as the team will review them on a rolling basis.
Volunteer with the Urban Room
Meet the curator
Past exhibitions
Memory Workshop Open Days
15/11/2024 - 11/12/2024
A series of workshops and conversations about technical, narrative, and ethical considerations when archiving and documenting contested histories and heritage.
In Practice II: Student Showcase
28/08/2024 - 02/11/2024
Explore creative, multidisciplinary work from students in the UCL SCCI Public History and the UCL Urban Lab Global Urbanism postgraduate programmes.
The In Practice ll Student Showcase demonstrates the students' diverse approaches to understanding today's social challenges, related to colonial legacies, urban change, and belonging. You will have the opportunity to engage with creative outputs such as zines, websites, interpretative installations, photography, and moving image.
Memory Work
05/07/2024 - 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.
Visitors at the Opening of the Memory Work exhibition at the UCL Urban Room
The 'Voices of East Bank' audio booth, a project supported by the UCL Memory Bike to create an online archive of stories about east London’s heritage and communities.
A poem and series of woven panels reflecting on the legacy and future of 'Hinemihi', an historic Māori meeting house in the National Trust's Clandon Park.
Living Archives [Archivo Vivo]: A project that documents the stories of territorial reclamation in Moravia (Medellín, Colombia) as part of the city's living heritage.
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.
'Maplective' installation co-created by Sonia E. Barrett and the East Bank map-lective. UCL Urban Room. May 2024.
Members of the East Bank map-lective at a workshop in the UCL Urban Room, May 2024. East Bank map-lective co-producers: Dijle Akdag, Adwoa Brown, Abiba Coulibaly, Lumiere Chieh, Toyin Gbomedo, Shelley Grimmond, Jenice Joseph.
'Desk work' by Sonia E. Barrett
Member of the East Bank map-lective at a workshop in the UCL Urban Room. Credit: Sarah Bennett
Sonia E. Barrett talks to visitors at the UCL Urban Room in front of her 'Desk Work' sculptures. Credit: Sarah Bennett
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