This course takes London as its classroom. Starting from a series of guided walks and individual wanderings centred on the Thames, it offers walking as a method for investigating this many-layered city: its different pasts, varied textures, and constant juxtapositions of scale. There are libraries of words about London—and no shortage of images. The challenge in studying the city is to find your way through the mass of material, to wander without getting (too) lost. This course gives students the skills in reading and selecting from the endless flow of information to make the most of their explorations. To make sense of and profit from the chaos of the London around them, students will set their perceptions against those who have inhabited, contemplated, and transformed the city before them—enriching and crystallizing their own Londons by analyzing and curating others’ representations of it in fiction, verse, visual art, film, and architecture. First-hand investigation and collective reflection will have the class working confidently between the observation, history, and imagination of one of the world’s great metropolises.
“Walking London” is exciting, innovative, and rewarding (and the best possible introduction to London as a city in a single course), in part because it expects a steady commitment, including significant reading, week on week. Operating as a seminar, the course uses the studio as a model of collaborative practice and research. Students of different academic backgrounds working together is one of its strengths. To this end, all are welcome, and students from Architecture, Design, and Studio Arts are especially encouraged to join. The only prerequisite is curiosity.
As the course is popular, admission will be by permission—the process starting with an expression of interest in the course preference stage.
This course has an associated course fee. See the London Course Fees page for more information.
Department: English and Textual Studies
Location: London
Semesters: Fall, Spring
Credits: 3