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VCU11110.1177/1470412911430467Beck and CornfordJournal of visual culture

journal of visual culture

The Art School in Ruins

John Beck and Matthew Cornford

Abstract
As the British government effectively privatizes higher education
in the arts, humanities and social sciences, this article tours the
monuments that remain (and some that do not) of the last great
era in state-funded training in art and design in the UK: the time
between the Second World War and the absorption of art schools into
polytechnics and universities when institutions intended to provide
artisanal training became the autonomously regulated spaces where
much of British popular culture was produced and disseminated. As
recently as 1984, Simon Frith and Howard Horne could still write
that in Britain every small town has its art school. This is no longer
the case; while in 1959 there were 180 dedicated art and design
institutions in the UK, now there are only a dozen left. The rest
of the buildings have been quietly forgotten, renovated as luxury
apartments and social housing, adapted as annexes of other, larger
institutions, abandoned to the elements, or demolished. Combining
image and text, this article explores the abandoned and reused
sites of British art schools as the ruined markers of a lost future of
unregulated creative practice.

Keywords
architecture art school education nostalgia photography ruin

Tucked away in the backstreets of Great Yarmouth, a once prosperous port

and holiday destination on the east coast of England, is the recently opened
Time and Tide Museum. Established in 2005 at a cost of 4.7m in a converted
Victorian herring curing works, the museum combines artefacts, paintings
and historical reconstructions of fishing boats and street scenes to depict the

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SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC)
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Vol 11(1): 5883 DOI 10.1177/1470412911430467

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 Beck and Cornford The Art School in Ruins 59

story of life in Great Yarmouth through the ages. Time and Tide is situated
in the area of town designated by government administration as Nelson
ward, one of the most deprived wards in the UK and troubled by chronic
unemployment, poor housing and drug dependency. A short walk from
the Time and Tide museum along Nelson Road Central leads to St Georges
Park, which has recently benefited from a 2m redevelopment. The park
has been re-landscaped and the Victorian perimeter railings removed; new
lighting and security have improved safety and a number of art features
decorate the site, which received a Green Flag Award from the Civic Trust
in 2008 (Great Yarmouth Borough Council: online).
Overlooking the park, at the junction of Nelson Road Central and Trafalgar
Road, is Great Yarmouth College of Art and Design, first opened in 1913
as the Municipal School of Art. After a period of closure during the Second
World War, when its reinforced foundations provided perfect bomb-proof
protection for the towns valuables, the school reopened in 1948 and by
1960 was teaching 1500 mainly part-time students. The college merged with
Norwich School of Art in 1986 to form the Norfolk Institute of Art and
Design, but the distance between the two sites did not secure the future of
Yarmouth College of Art and Design, which finally closed in 1996 (Stevens,
1996). The Grade II listed Trafalgar Road building remained derelict for
many years, its windows knocked out and the site protected by high fences
and electronic security. After a spell when the basement served as a crack
den, the art school is currently being refurbished as social housing.
The less than half a square mile that includes Time and Tide, St Georges
Park, the College of Art and Design and extreme levels of social and
economic deprivation is as concise an indication as can be found of the
complex and contradictory recent history of the management of public
space in the UK. The main plotlines of the narrative are all here: heritage as
an engine of regeneration characterized by signature buildings levered into
rundown neighborhoods; the rationalization of further and higher education
and the hiving off of sites to developers; and the intensive surveillance and
regulation of public places. The removal of trees and railings in St Georges
Park not only makes it more inviting and accessible; there is now no hiding
place for drug-users or potential muggers and there is a clear run from
the street for police units in pursuit of suspects. The public benefits here
are underwritten by disciplinary motives and, while it would be absurd to
argue that Time and Tide is an act of aggression upon the community within
which it sits (it is undeniably a remarkable achievement and a beautiful
museum), it is nonetheless equally ridiculous not to note the irony of a
public institution designed to tell the story of a lost Great Yarmouth of
prosperity and confidence that is situated in an area almost entirely bereft
of hope and aspiration. The museum offers mannequins posed in ways
that suggest productive work while the unemployed wander past the
decommissioned educational establishment to spend a quiet afternoon in
the park (adult admission to Time and Tide is 4.50). The unintended bathos
latent in the names of things Nelson, Trafalgar, St George only reinforces

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60 journal of visual culture 11(1)

the sense that the town has failed to live up to its heroic past; even calling
the museum Time and Tide seems to embrace the inevitability of decline.
There are complicated reasons for the economic and social dilapidation of
towns like Great Yarmouth, some particular to its location and history the
collapse of the herring industry, the demise of the British seaside holiday
and others broader and more pervasive, such as the effects of decades of
underinvestment in infrastructure and industry and the cumulative impact
of generations of unemployment and poverty. While the peculiarities of
Nelson ward are its own, the general circumstances of the area are the
common experience of towns and cities throughout the UK. In many of
them stands a disused art school.

The Accident of Art School

As recently as 1984, Simon Frith and Howard Horne (1984: 14) could still
write, approvingly, that in Britain every small town has its art school. This
is no longer the case and there are now only a handful of dedicated schools
of art and design in the UK, the buildings of the rest renovated as luxury
apartments or social housing, adapted as annexes of other, larger institutions,
or abandoned to the elements. Like the mills, factories, cinemas and other
defunct places of work and leisure ripe for asset-stripping during the long
boom from the mid-1990s to 2007, the purpose-built art school has long
since disappeared from British town centres as a functioning proposition.
This is not to say that art and design education disappeared along with the
buildings, nor is it adequate to portray the end of provincial art schools as
an unequivocal act of cultural and educational vandalism. Yet the passing
of the art school has left visible traces in the towns and cities that once
housed them and the idea of art school continues to stimulate the British
cultural imaginary in ways that a college of further education or university
department rarely manages to achieve.
What Frith and Horne were interested in during the 1980s was not the complex
reality of maintaining buildings, balancing budgets, retaining students, or
developing distinctive research programmes. The most productive aspect of
the local art school for Frith and Horne is not really educational at all but
is instead environmental and affective. The persistence of the allure and
mystique of art school as a set of vaguely defined and under-scrutinized
concepts, possibilities and practices is really what they value, a bundle of
notions circulating in the ether, contained within the rooms and corridors
of a designated site and spilling out into the streets, pubs, cafs, shops and
bedsits of the surrounding environment. As such, the physical space of the
art school is the condition of possibility under which a particular way of
life is able to thrive. The art school experience is about commitment to a
working practice, Frith and Horne (1987: 28) claim, to a mode of learning
which assumes the status of a lifestyle. And it is because it is a lifestyle
that art school has come to represent far more than what it is; art school,
especially during the 1960s and 1970s, became shorthand in the UK for a

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 Beck and Cornford The Art School in Ruins 61

set of values and practices outward-looking, international, experimental

that stood as an alternative model of British social and cultural identity
embedded within the fabric of an often more prosaic life of local everyday
concerns. What was particularly striking about this cultural moment was
that this alternative way of life was being lived in hundreds of towns across
the country by thousands of often working-class school-leavers and paid for
by local authorities. While at ground level the reality may have been quite
ordinary, the idea of art school and all that it promised was nevertheless
available close at hand.
Most art schools in the UK were established as institutions of practical and
technical training. The Butler Education Act of 1944 had expanded the
provision of secondary education to all at a time of huge population growth
and, given the paltry percentage of UK school-leavers entering university,
art schools provided a viable training environment for those sections of the
population, including women and the working class, who benefited from the
Butler Act but were not eligible for or interested in a university place. The main
art school qualification after 1946 was the National Diploma in Design (NDD),
a four-year programme aimed at school leavers that was split into two years
of general technical training followed by two more years of specialization in
a major and minor subject drawn from a range of craft and design options.
These may not sound like the conditions out of which might grow a working
practice that assumes the status of a lifestyle, but what is distinctive about art
schools is the way they combined training in vocational trades with exposure
to developments in the contemporary fine arts. For many working-class
students, art school became not just a skills provider but a portal through
which the most advanced cultural debates and practices of the time could be
encountered. It is this collision of tradecraft and high art experienced by an
unprecedented socially diverse student body that produces the moment of the
British art school as an engine of unforeseen cultural outcomes.
The impact of art school-driven fashion, design and music upon the emerging
mass media of the 1960s and 1970s is well known and the history of those
successes does not need to be rehearsed here (see, for example, Bracewell,
2007; Hebdige, 2002; Savage, 2005; Walker, 1988). What is significant is
that the local art school provided an entry point for many of the designers,
photographers, advertising executives, musicians, filmmakers and artists
who would proceed to define an emerging British popular culture in
subsequent decades, at the same time cementing the status of art school
as the site of creative possibility and social mobility. It is no small irony,
then, that the conditions under which the idea of art school as a way of
life was produced were already in the process of being eliminated even
at the moment of the myths most visible triumphs. By the time Frith and
Horne were celebrating a history of provincial art school subcultures in the
mid-1980s, the process of art school amalgamation and closure had been
underway for over 20 years. Even as art school in the 1960s was becoming
shorthand for creative innovation and energy in the mainstream media,
the place of the autonomous art school in provincial Britain was being

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62 journal of visual culture 11(1)

dismantled as part of the drive to modernize higher education. The vibrancy

of the post-punk years that Frith and Horne describe, then, is conceivably
the last time it could be said that the creative life of British youth was
sourced in small-town colleges of art and design.
Inside art schools in the 1950s, the centrally administered and examined
NDD was less than popular with many students and staff. The emphasis on
what were becoming, by the end of the decade, vocationally redundant crafts
like bookbinding, pottery and tapestry also made the NDD increasingly
anachronistic in the eyes of the Ministry of Education, which proposed in
a 1957 report to replace the qualification with a non-centralized three-year
programme more responsive to the needs of industry. An advisory council
was set up in 1959, chaired by the Slade Professor of Painting Sir William
Coldstream, to restructure art education in the UK (Tickner, 2008: 1516).
The recommendations of what is commonly referred to as The Coldstream
Report (1960) shifted the emphasis of training away from traditional skills
and closer to the requirements of a liberal arts undergraduate education. One
of the ways that this was done was through the introduction of a compulsory
academic element into the new Diploma in Art and Design (DipAD) and
beefed up art history provision (Candlin, 2001: 302). Demanding a minimum
of five GCE O level passes as an entry requirement, the DipAD operated as
a degree-level course for a reduced number of students working in a smaller
number of institutions. Those art schools, unequipped or otherwise unable
to offer the DipAD, could run vocational training courses of various kinds,
including part-time and day release options.
The National Council for Diplomas in Art and Design (NCDAD) was set
up in 1961, chaired by architectural historian Sir John Summerson, to
implement the Coldstream recommendations. Out of just over 200 DipAD
course proposals received from over 80 colleges, 61 courses from 29
colleges were eventually recognized by NCDAD in 1964. The effect, as Lisa
Tickner (2008: 19) explains, was traumatic for the majority of colleges, left
without nationally recognized courses in any area and obliged to diversify
with part-time and lower-level vocational work. While the introduction of
the DipAD served in part to effect a division between community-oriented
training colleges and more specialized Diploma-awarding art schools, the
move did not secure the autonomy of art education institutions for very
long, many of which, despite resistance from Coldstream and Summerson,
ended up being merged with new polytechnics during the 1960s. In 1974,
the DipAD was scrapped in favor of the BA (Hons) in Art and Design,
effectively integrating art education into the national system of higher
qualifications. Writing in The Listener on the eve of the introduction of the
new degree in 1973, Peter Lloyd Jones (1975: 63) reflected on what might
have been, had the opportunity presented by the Coldstream Report not
resulted in a disappointing uniformity among Diploma-awarding schools.
In allowing art schools to propose their own courses, the Coldstream Report
invited the potential for schools to shape provision according to need.
One would have expected, Jones writes, wide differences: metropolitan or

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 Beck and Cornford The Art School in Ruins 63

regional, academic or craft-biased, socially committed or market-orientated,

depending on local circumstances. In practice, this diversity did not occur
in anything like the way it should have and an opportunity to integrate art
education into local or regional economies and cultures was passed over.
The failure of art schools to create relevant and innovative programmes driven
by local contingencies was caused, according to Jones, by a combination of
the influence of what he calls the commercial avant-garde and the woeful
implementation of the Coldstream proposals. On one hand, the celebration of
the market-driven overnight success of a handful of art and design superstars
skewed the function and purpose of a national art education, while on the
other the seemingly indiscriminate process of assessing proposed Diploma
courses and summary rejection threw many institutions into disarray, leading
to an uncoordinated post hoc scramble for validation that had little bearing
on what was actually appropriate for the needs of individual schools. While a
confident art school system should have been able to challenge [the] febrile
and destructive academicism of the star system, for Jones this confidence was
undermined by the very system of reform intended to provide it (p. 63). While
Jones reserves judgement on the introduction of the BA and the polytechnics,
he concedes that many staff and students interpreted the changes in art
education since Coldstream as a gigantic scheme to slash the number of art
students (p. 65). Read alongside the economic crisis of the 1970s and the radical
budget cuts to education that followed during the 1980s, the rationalization
of art education initiated at the beginning of the 1960s might be seen less as
a decisive blow in the demise of an idea of art school and more as part of
a wide-ranging collapse of postwar British social fluidity and redistributive
prosperity. Demanding five O level passes is hardly an exclusionary practice,
but the introduction of minimum academic requirements does begin a process
of regulation that shrinks the aperture through which the not so well educated
malingerers, lateral thinkers and institutionally maladjusted could pass into a
kind of alternative social space where dysfunction and waywardness could
be conceived of as criteria for admittance. While there is no small measure
of romance in this conception, it is precisely this anomalous status that the
provincial art school, for a few decades and despite the moves to rationalize
provision, traded under and benefited from.
Speaking at Tate Britain in 2004 on the occasion of his retirement from
teaching fine art for 45 years, Jon Thomson described the shift in art
education policy he registered on his return to the UK in 1998 after six
years in Maastricht. When he left England in the early 1990s, Thomson
(2005: 218) explains, most fine art departments were still in polytechnics
or independent art and design colleges. When he came back, however, he
discovered that

most of them had been bundled unceremoniously into an extended

and unified university system where they found themselves subject
to the same kind of generalising academic and professional pressures
that have always been applied in the governance of university subjects.

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64 journal of visual culture 11(1)

For Thomson, fine art is not a subject of study nor is it a discipline; it has
no root or normative rules of procedure. Rather, it is a loose assemblage
of first-order materially based activities taking place in a speculative
existential territory that has no boundaries (p. 218). As such, as far as
Thomson is concerned, fine art education cannot be translated using the
vocabulary of scholarly research activity that universities use to determine
standards. While Thomson is broadly sympathetic to the original aims of
the Coldstream agenda, he identifies the amalgamation of art schools into
polytechnics as the beginning of a process of dismantling that has done
away with the open-ended explorations that previously defined fine art
practice as of a different order to research-driven scholarship.
Although Thomsons remarks should not be taken as definitive or as
conclusive evidence that the kind of art education he describes is at an end,
his refusal to see art as a subject of study or discipline and the claims
made for fine art as a speculative existential territory do recall Frith and
Hornes sense of the art school as a place where learning assumes the
status of a lifestyle. Thomsons articulation of art education reminds us
of the utopian dimension to the conception of art school as a space not
bound by disciplinary rules of procedure, where any first-order materially
based activities can happen. Whether or not Thomsons notion of fine art
can exist within a university is of less interest here than the way in which
he conceives of art practice as a speculative territory: doing art is a mode
of emplaced being that cannot be bound by normative rules. The struggles
over art education in the UK since the Second World War are in no small
part struggles to locate and maintain this speculative territory. To paraphrase
Marx, a spectre is haunting fine art education, the spectre of the art school.
Thomsons speculative territory is also spectral, since beyond the pedagogic
and institutional arguments over the utopian prospect of an unfettered art
education, the ghost of the art school continues to haunt the countrys high
streets and town squares.

Nostalgia for Ruins

It would be a falsification of history to suggest that there was a golden age
of art education in the UK that is now gone forever. Provincial art schools
may have provided a space for many local young people unsuited or unable
to attend university as well as the talented and ambitious but they were also
incubators of the same sexism, prejudice and petty despotism that afflicted
any other institution and workplace of the time. What is beyond question,
though, is that the time when every small town has its art school is over
and that the possibilities of what that might mean, not just in terms of
notional social and cultural mobility but also for the place of art within the
public realm, have been lost. From West Bromwich and Walsall to Margate
and Great Yarmouth, the signature gallery or museum now provides a
version of culture that is close at hand, whether through touring shows or
in permanent displays of local history. As temporary custodians of luxury

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 Beck and Cornford The Art School in Ruins 65

goods, galleries offer access to the global art market within high-spec
venues capable of simulating the metropolitan spectacle of elite culture,
while museums provide reassurance that the local past has not entered the
dustbin of history but is worthy of display in lottery-funded memorials to
lost industry and community. Meanwhile, across the country the art school
is in ruins.
Conventionally, a ruin is aesthetically compelling because the hard edges
of history have been softened by time, yet the movements of capital and
modern warfare have made it possible to produce ruins overnight. Ruin value
is no longer predicated on age alone but is bound up with the financial
and symbolic possibilities of reuse and display; as Andreas Huyssen (2006:
10) has suggested, since the age of turbo capitalism has diminished the
opportunity for things to age of their own accord, the ruin of the 21st century
is either detritus or restored age. The growth of interest in the modern ruin
in the UK and elsewhere is bound up with the decline of manufacturing in
the developed world and the symbolic value of dereliction has risen as the
productive capacity of industry has shrunk. Industrial archaeology emerged
in the UK at a time when urban redevelopment was rapidly transforming the
landscapes created by the industrial revolution and there was real concern
that sites of historical importance would be unceremoniously swept away.
Stressing what could be learned from industrial remains, Michael Rix warned
in 1955 that the British are so oblivious of our national heritage that apart from
a few museum pieces, the majority of [industrial] landmarks are neglected or
unwittingly destroyed (quoted in Palmer and Neaverson, 1998: 1). To some
extent, Rixs warning has been heeded, as the loft apartments, industrial
theme parks and museums that now litter the country appear to confirm.
The preservation or restoration of a ruin, however, can function to conceal
or ameliorate the circumstances that ruined it even as the preserved structure
is made to stand for the triumph of respect for history over modernizing
vandalism. That which has been ruined is, first and foremost, a sign of
powers movement across the terrain and the recuperation of abandonment
does not cancel the original act of ruination. Tim Edensor (2005: 4) reminds
us that the production of spaces of ruination and dereliction are an inevitable
result of capitalist development and the relentless search for profit. As
less profitable aspects of the production process are periodically dropped,
buildings are abandoned as the devalued remainder of a business enterprise
that has absconded in pursuit of cheaper resources and new markets. In
their abandonment, however, these spaces also offer, for Edensor, room
for critical exploration where the interpretation and practice of the city
becomes liberated from the everyday constraints which determine what
should be done and where, and which encode the city with meanings (p.
4). Such spaces, for Edensor, provide opportunities for challenging and
deconstructing the imprint of power on the city (p. 4). To think of the
derelict site in this way positions contemplation of the modern ruin as an
engagement not just with the past that has been lost but the present in
which ruination continues to occur.

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66 journal of visual culture 11(1)

If the modern ruin no longer has to be old, the other aspect of the picturesque
ruin that remains troublesome to Edensors politicized contemplation of
dereliction is the way that ruins often trade in nostalgia. One of the most
corrosive aspects of the heritage and property renovation businesses is
the way a kind of false memory syndrome has enabled the reification of
complex historical conditions as marketable goods and services. If ruins
are to challenge and deconstruct the imprint of power, they must have the
capacity to resist the commodifying embrace of the culture industry and
the manipulation of affect through a sentimentalizing nostalgia. To do so,
a critical nostalgia for ruins has to interrogate memory itself as part of the
process of apprehension whereby the derelict structure does not merely
represent a loss but calls forth a consideration of the very condition of loss
and what that might mean.
In her discussion of post-Communist Europe, Svetlana Boym (2001: 78)
makes the distinction between what she calls intentional and unintentional
monuments. While the intentional monument, Boym argues, recuperates
single moments in history made exemplary for the purpose of the present
and is less interested in the past than in victory over time itself, the
unintentional monument is inimical to the idea of commemoration and is
instead about physical and human frailty, aging and the unpredictability of
change (p. 78). As intentional monuments to a reified sense of local history
or the achieved totality of the global art market, the engineering of public
culture by custom-fitted galleries and museums speaks less to the experience
of those it purports to serve and more to the aggressive creative destruction
that lays waste to collective enterprise in order to install monuments to its
own capacity for appropriation and exploitation. In the face of this, the
unintentional monument of the local art school, like Edensors industrial
ruins, stands in critical relation to the obfuscating intentional monuments
to power.
If we are to give space to a nostalgia for a time when every small town had
its art school, it must be a nostalgia that refuses to dwell in a fabricated
past untroubled by the complexities of history and instead locates in the
sense of loss a critical perspective from which to apprehend the nature
and consequences of what has been lost. Boym is instructive here,
differentiating between what she calls modes of restorative and reflective
nostalgia. Restorative nostalgia is about patching up the memory gaps and
rebuilding a lost home through the recreation of notionally lost traditions,
values and institutions; reflective nostalgia, by contrast, is concerned with
the imperfect process of remembrance (p. 41). Reflective nostalgia, for
Boym, is not about a retreat into the past but about the irrevocability of
the past; it is a critical nostalgia that cherishes shattered fragments of
memory and temporalizes space (p. 49). Boyms conception of reflective
nostalgia suggests a mode of apprehension that is able to grasp the element
of longing in nostalgia as a critical rather than a disabling dimension of
the ruins affective significance. Places, Boym insists, are contexts for
remembrances and debates about the future, not symbols of memory or

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 Beck and Cornford The Art School in Ruins 67

nostalgia. Thus places in the city are not merely architectural metaphors;
they are also screen memories for urban dwellers, projections of contested
remembrances (p. 77, emphases in original). Just as Edensor sees the ruin
as an opportunity to challenge the imprint of power on the city, Boym
conceives of the unintentional memorial as a space located by a reflective
nostalgia that can engage in historical improvisation and unpredictable
juxtaposition (p. 79) by pursuing lived environments, everyday ways of
inhabiting the city by following and deviating from the rules, tales of urban
identity and stories of urban life (pp. 778). In this way, as Huyssen (2005:
78) puts it, nostalgia can be a utopia in reverse whereby the object of loss
can still seem to hold a promise that has vanished from our own age: the
promise of an alternative future. Here the ruin works as a provocation to
imagine futures that did not happen in the light of the future that did.
Connecting the ruined art school to the history of its abandonment through
its affective presence as memory trace binds not only past, present and
futures, both proleptic and imagined, but demands a recognition of the ways
the art school is bound into the broader networks of personal and collective
memory and in the sited relationships between institutions and their
social, economic and environmental contexts. In this way, the potentially
disabling sentimentality of nostalgic memories for an imagined space of art
is countered by an historical awareness of both the dubious service to which
that nostalgia can be put the commodification of lost worlds of labour and
community as heritage and a present-tense recognition of the context within
which ruination has been made acceptable: the dereliction by disinvestment
in communities and their environments. From this perspective, the ruined
art school in Great Yarmouth calls attention to itself as an unintentional
monument to a future art education lost amidst institutional rationalization
and a failure to embed art and design training in socially relevant contexts.
At the same time, the abandoned art school stands as an ambivalent and
critical counterpoint to the regeneration projects adjacent to it the museum
and park that are themselves only made financially feasible by the junk
status of the land values structural poverty has made possible.
An approach to the remains of the art school, then, must begin at
the intersection of what Peter Fritzsche (2001: 1588) calls nostalgias
melancholy feeling of dispossession and the refusal to countenance the
affirmations of abandonment rebranded as redevelopment. This critical
intersection is a version, we think, of the speculative existential territory
that Thomson claims for art, where the art school, in its ruination, remains
the site through which a loose assemblage of first-order materially based
activities can take place, albeit from the outside. Art schools are far from
being the only modern ruins, and alongside the mainstreaming of industrial
archaeology, the boom in renovated heritage sites and retrofitted luxury
living, various forms of so-called urban exploration and situationist-inspired
psychogeography have, in recent years, come to occupy a prominent
place in contemporary negotiations of urban and ex-urban space (Bonnett,
2009; High and Lewis, 2007). Our attention to art schools belongs inside

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68 journal of visual culture 11(1)

this broader interrogation of the ways in which public space has become
privatized and spectacularized. The abandoned structures of unprofitable
enterprise press hard upon the conduct of daily life and the affective power
of modern ruins has become a nodal point through which struggles over the
interpretation of history and the function of remembrance are played out.
Before Boyms ruminations on St Petersburg, Moscow, and Berlin, Patrick
Wright (1985, 1991) had already scrutinized the emergence during the
Thatcher years of heritage Britain and its low-rent analogues in down-at-
heel east London. Similar territory continues to be extensively critically
excavated by Iain Sinclair (1997, 2005, 2011) and in Patrick Keillers
melancholy films (1994, 1999, 2011) about the degraded British landscape
and its atrophied public sphere. While Wright, Sinclair, and Keiller are old
enough to remember life before neoliberalism and are driven by precisely
the kind of countercultural avant-gardism that the art schools of the 1960s
and 1970s came to represent, Owen Hatherley (2009, 2010) is part of a new
generation of urban wanderers poking around the edgelands of post-Blair
Britain, caught in the grim paradox of nostalgia for a time yet to come
(Hatherley, 2009: 8). The internet, meanwhile, is saturated with images of
so-called ruin porn, produced by armies of trespassers with digital cameras
from Hartlepool to Detroit clambering into derelict hospitals, factories,
asylums, fallout shelters and subterranean vaults.
This fascination with the detritus of modernity has a long history that would
require a more extensive discussion than we have space to include here
(see Dillon, 2011; Hell and Shnle, 2010; Salerno, 2005; Trigg, 2006), but
the increasingly visible attention being paid to contemporary dereliction
in the UK and elsewhere registers, we think, the acute extent to which
the collapsing infrastructure of British public space and its institutions is
being felt. One of the dangers, though, with the way urban wandering has
emerged as a cultural preoccupation is that it, like the modern ruins being
explored, becomes codified and commodified as a recession-busting leisure
pursuit, threatening to dissipate the performative critical interrogation of
official vandalism such exploration provides. It is worth remembering that
situationist psychogeography, the driver behind much contemporary urban
exploration, emerged as a radical response to the transformation of Paris
by urban planners in the 1950s (Sadler, 1999: 4766). As Peter Wollen
(1999: 33) suggests, the unstructured drives that sought to affectively
reconnect the segmented zones of capitalist space and thereby produce an
integrated understanding of material conditions, like the maps and writings
produced out of these wanderings, commemorate the old Paris and issue
a warning against future trends, sadly unheeded. This double context
Wollen identifies as key to understanding the work of the Situationists of a
pessimistic critique of contemporary society combined with an optimistic
utopian futurology (p. 35) continues to inform critical responses to urban
space that Alastair Bonnett (2009: 46) calls the struggle over the politics
of loss within the radical imagination. For Bonnett, the conflict between
the use of the past to critique industrial modernity and the suppression

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 Beck and Cornford The Art School in Ruins 69

of nostalgia (p. 46) is a consequence of modern radicalisms disavowal

of loss as retrogressive and conservative. A reconnection of radicalism
with nostalgia what Wollen identifies as the Situationist combination of
defiance and elegy positions the modern ruin not as an object of aesthetic
contemplation but as evidence of something that has been destroyed.
Part of the function of the psychogeographers wandering and the urban
explorers act of trespass is to move in directions and places beyond
regulation, to discover things hidden or lost among the proprietary
systems and managerial grids of contemporary spatial politics. Generally
speaking, Britains old art schools are not intentionally hidden but their
abandonment or reuse has rendered them only obliquely visible. A tour of
the ruined art schools of Great Britain demands time and determination,
a willingness to roam the blank spots of neoliberal asymmetrical
development and carouse the remnants of post-war provincial bohemia.
Among the pound shops and chain pubs of contemporary British towns
and cities are the brownfield developments, luxury apartments, assisted
living accommodation, enterprise zones and everyday low pricing
supermarket promises that have colonized what were once the spaces of
art education. As the British coalition government begins the process of
privatizing higher education in the arts, humanities and social sciences,
the remains of an almost forgotten world of small-town art schools stands
as a monument to a future that did not happen and as a warning of what
is about to be lost.
Our project is to locate and photographically document every art school
building in the UK. This record functions, in Boyms (2001: 77) words,
as a screen memory for the projection of contested remembrances not
only about the history of art education and its institutions, but about the
place of art in the public sphere, about where art might have been or
could be a working practice that assumes the status of a lifestyle. To the
extent that the acts of seeking, finding, recording and collating evidence
of these sites are also part of a ground-level traversal of urban space in
all its contemporary configurations, the fieldwork of art school ruin travel
is a reiteration of Boyms point that the ruin is not merely something
that reminds us of the past; it is also a reminder of the future, when our
present becomes history (p. 79). Elegy is retrospective; defiance must
look ahead.

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Huyssen, A. (2006) Nostalgia for Ruins, Grey Room 23: 621.
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(originally published in The Listener 90: 265).
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Savage, J. (2005) Englands Dreaming: The Sex Pistols and Punk Rock. London:
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 Beck and Cornford The Art School in Ruins 71

Figure 1 Bilston School of Art, Mount Pleasant, Bilston, West Midlands.

Designed by C.L.N. Wilson, this Grade II listed building was opened as a Technical
School in 1897 to celebrate Queen Victorias Diamond Jubilee. In 1948, the school
was divided in two parts, the School of Art and the Technical School. New buildings
were opened the same year including two classrooms and a combined hall and
gymnasium. In 1949, the school became Bilston College of Further Education and
then, in 1970, an annex to the newly built College of Further Education at Westfield
Road. Later it was incorporated in the much larger Bilston Technical College but
was eventually abandoned. As of 2010, the building is in a poor state of repair and
empty.

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72 journal of visual culture 11(1)

Figure 2 Moseley School of Art, Alcester Road, Balsall Heath, Birmingham,

West Midlands.
Designed by W.H. Bidlake and located on a busy commercial street directly opposite
the public library and public baths, the school opened in 1900 and closed in 1975.
The Moseley School of Art Association has a website dedicated to former pupils and
organizes an annual reunion at the building.

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 Beck and Cornford The Art School in Ruins 73

Figure 3 Bromley College of Art, Tweedy Road, Bromley, London.

Designed by John Sulman and built on a site opposite Bromley Town Hall, the
building was opened in 1878, extended in 1886 and again in 1894 to accommodate
the new Public Library. The former Science and Art School was amalgamated with
Beckenham School of Art and Sidcup School of Art to become Ravensbourne College
of Art & Design in 1962. Grade II listed, the building is now divided into private
flats.

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74 journal of visual culture 11(1)

Figure 4 The Mid-Essex Technical College and School of Art, Victoria Road
South (facing Market Street), Chelmsford, Essex.
The School of Science and Art, the Museum and the Public Library were opened in
February 1906. A large art deco extension was built in 1931, and in 1935 the Mid-
Essex Technical College & School of Art was established. From 1976 the Tec went
through a long and complex sequence of mergers and name changes, eventually
becoming the City Centre Campus of Anglia Ruskin University. At the end of the
2005/6 academic year, the University closed the City Centre Campus and sold the
site to a private developer, all facilities moving to new university buildings at the
Rivermead campus in Chelmsford. The site is currently vacant.

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 Beck and Cornford The Art School in Ruins 75

Figure 5Great Yarmouth College of Art & Design, Trafalgar Road, Great
Yarmouth, Norfolk.
Unlike many provincial art schools which were originally built as technical schools,
J.W. Cockrils Grade II listed Great Yarmouth building is a purpose-built art school,
opening in 1913 as the Municipal School of Art. After reopening as the School of
Arts & Crafts in 1948, the college amalgamated with Norwich School of Art in 1988
and closed in June 1996. Whilst the Borough Council was keen to keep the building
for cultural or artistic use, it remained empty until 2010. The building is now being
renovated and converted into 18 flats for the Flagship Housing Group in association
with the Homes and Communities Agency.

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76 journal of visual culture 11(1)

Figure 6Horsham School of Art, Oakfield, Hurst Road, Horsham, West

Sussex.
Situated a short walk from Horsham Railway Station, the college remained an art
facility when it became part of Northbrook College in 1986. As part of a review
of cost effectiveness and course duplication, the site closed in 2005. The building
was sold to a property developer but soon afterwards caught fire, after which the
building was deemed a danger to the public and demolished.

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 Beck and Cornford The Art School in Ruins 77

Figure 7 Ipswich Civic College (including the Ipswich School of Art), High
Street, Ipswich, Suffolk.
Located close to the town centre, Roy Ascott ran his Ground Course at this Victorian
building and 1930s annex during the 1960s. The art department was moved to the
main Ipswich Civic College building in 1997. The building is owned by Suffolk New
College, who have leased the building to Ipswich Borough Council for two years. In
July 2010, Ipswich Art School was opened as a contemporary art gallery, with a first
for Ipswich exhibition from the world-renowned Saatchi Collection.

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78 journal of visual culture 11(1)

Figure 8 Thanet School of Art & Crafts, Hawley Square, Margate, Kent.
Built in 1931, the opening programme promised that Much thought has been given
to the planning of the accommodation in order to embody all the most up-to-date
ideas connected with art education on both the applied and cultural sides. The
building is now used by Kent County Council as an Adult Education Centre.

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 Beck and Cornford The Art School in Ruins 79

Figure 9 Sidcup School of Art, Grassington Road, Sidcup, London.

Opened in 1934, the prospectus of 19634 explained that the institution was
specifically designed and equipped to serve the needs of a small community,
which is its prime purpose today. Sidcup was later amalgamated with Bromley and
Beckenham to become Ravensbourne College of Art & Design. As of 2010, the site
is occupied by a large supermarket and car park.

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80 journal of visual culture 11(1)

Figure 10 Municipal College and Art School, Victoria Circus, Southend-on-

Sea, Essex.
Designed by Henry Thomas Hare, a prolific public library architect also responsible
for Oxford Town Hall, the building was opened by Daisy Greville, Countess of
Warwick in 1902 and it was extended in 1905. Initially the Southend Technical
School, it became the School of Art in 1908. A new Civic Centre college was
completed in the 1960s and the original building was demolished in 1971. The
former college site was laid out temporarily as an open green space and car park;
nearly three decades and numerous planning applications later a redbrick structure
now accommodates an Odeon multiplex and a branch of the HSBC bank.

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 Beck and Cornford The Art School in Ruins 81

Figure 11 Stroud School of Art, Lansdown Road, Stroud, Gloucestershire.

Designed by W.H.C. Fisher and built by J.P. Seddon in 1891, the Grade II listed
School of Art and Science building includes on its faade busts of Queen Victoria,
Faraday, Barry, Kelvin, Rossetti and Turner. Stroud School of Art was amalgamated
with Cheltenham College of Art in September 1959 to form Gloucestershire College
of Art. At present the building is used by Waldorf College, a private education
provider for 1620-year-olds.

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82 journal of visual culture 11(1)

Figure 12 West Sussex School of Art & Craft, Union Place, Worthing, West
Sussex.
While Hayden P. Robertss original building opened in 1911, it was radically extended
and rendered in a modernist Art Deco style by C.G. Stillman in 1933. Situated in
the centre of Worthing, near the town hall, library, police station, post office and the
Connaught Theatre, the building was demolished in 2008. The site is now occupied
by private assisted living retirement flats.

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 Beck and Cornford The Art School in Ruins 83

A Note on Images

The selection of images reproduced here is a small sample from a growing

inventory of photographs of British art schools. This is an ongoing project
and the current selection is not intended as nationally representative but as
indicative of findings thus far. All photographs are by Matthew Cornford.

John Beck is a Reader in the School of English Literature, Language and

Linguistics at Newcastle University. His research is mainly concerned with
issues related to place and power. His most recent book is Dirty Wars:
Landscape, Power, and Waste in Western American Literature (University of
Nebraska Press, 2009).
Address: School of English Literature, Language, and Linguistics, Newcastle
University, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, UK. [email: j.m.beck@ncl.ac.uk]

Matthew Cornford is Professor of Fine Art at the University of Brighton.

His practice with David Cross has since the 1980s investigated arts ability to
test concepts, boundaries and definitions in an open society. A monograph,
Cornford & Cross, was published by Black Dog in 2009.

Address: Faculty of Arts, University of Brighton, Grand Parade, Brighton

BN2 0JY, UK. [m.cornford@brighton.ac.uk]

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