London is an endlessly fascinating, ever changing place and Bishopsgate Institute courses and archives reflect this in the literature and images within our programme and files.

Our London Collection covers over 50,000 books, maps, pamphlets and illustrations. There are approximately 40,000 London photographs in other collections. Our archive images have recently brought a piece of old London to the BBC website, the Daily Mail and regularly to the excellent Spitalfields Life blog.

Our Images of London: Lost Buildings and Streets course begins this Saturday, 6 October 2012, so we thought we would have a quick chat with the tutor Steven Barrett as he emerges from our archive with lost images ready for the course.

Steven says “It is very exciting to be using Bishopsgate Institute archive images because they contain so many that are unusual and unpublished. There is a particular abundance of amateur street views and pictures that conjure a definite sense of the period. To my knowledge many haven't been used in teaching before.”

The Images of London course is about the city seen through pictures of buildings and streets that have changed in recent years. It will focus primarily on the pictures themselves, mostly street photography and not commercially produced images, so our students will look at what's going on with the people, traffic and incidental things as well as the period 'look' of the photograph itself.

The course will include a historical segment each week, taking a different area of the city in turn, which will lead into a discussion and possibly reminiscence of personal associations with that area. We may explore through guided walks the relevant parts of the City that are accessible from the Bishopsgate Institute, weather permitting. Steven Barrett works mainly at Bishopsgate Institute and the National Gallery. He is particularly interested in how time affects works of art, either because of the changes in how art is talked and written about in different periods, or in the ways that memory alters our experience of works of art themselves. So a trip into London’s lost buildings and streets is an ideal course for him to lead.

Images of London: Lost Buildings and Streets begins 2.30pm on Saturday 6 October at Bishopsgate Institute and runs for six weeks. Each session is two hours, the cost is £93 and £73 concessions. Please see our courses website for more information and online enrolment.

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