All are welcome to join Dr Julia Winckler and Dr Annebella Pollen to celebrate their newly-released books exploring English utopian ideas and practices and their aftermath.

To sign up, please register via Ticket Source, booking link here:

Jointly hosted by the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories and the Centre for Design History, this in-person event will include two author talks, Q&A and discussion, plus drinks.

Julia Winckler’s Fabricating Lureland: A history of the imagination and memory of Peacehaven, a speculative interwar garden city development by the sea mobilizes extensive and previously underexplored archival material – including photographs, postcards, promotional magazines and blueprints infused by social utopian ideals – in order to investigate contested marketing and construction narratives of place.

Fabricating Lureland www.degruyter.com Through the analysis of surviving archival traces, this book constructs a history of the imagination and memory of the town of Peacehaven. Built as a speculative development atop iconic chalk cliffs on the Sussex Coast and marketed as a garden city by the sea, the estate quickly attracted adverse publicity. Influential voices such as the Bloomsbury group’s Virginia and Leonard Woolf, architect and writer Clough Williams-Ellis and the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England soon began to criticise it as a blot on the rolling, pastoral downland. Instead of reading and appraising Peacehaven’s story in a polarized way, this book breaks new ground by critically interpreting visual representations and commissioned photographs of the Estate and re-evaluating propositions from its inception, which aspired to secure improved public health and home ownership in direct response to the negative impact of industrialization and WWI. Focusing on the interwar period and tracing mutating age

Nudism in a Cold Climate: The Visual Culture of Naturists in Mid-20th-Century Britain by Annebella Pollen examines social nudism, or naturism, from the 1920s to the early 1970s, via nudists’ own words and images, to examine shifting attitudes to dress and undress, gender and sexuality, ethnicity and class, pleasure and power.

Nudism in a Cold Climate by Annebella Pollen — Atelier Éditions atelier-editions.com Atelier Éditions is pleased to announce the release of Nudism in a Cold Climate: The Visual Culture of Naturists in Mid-20th Century Britain by Annebella Pollen, available in the UK/Europe at the end of November, 2021 and the USA/Rest of World early January, 2022. Annebella Pollen’s richly illus