Brad Beaven’s inaugural lecture as Professor of Social and Cultural History, University of Portsmouth, took place on Wednesday 29 March 2017. In his well-received lecture, Beaven argued that the cultural life of port towns has largely remained a hidden history due to the focus of conventional histories of ports on their global and imperial networks. […]
Cultural organisation ‘Portsmouth Poetry’ has been awarded a grant of £10,000 by the Heritage Lottery Fund’s ‘First World War: then and now’ programme for their “I Died In Hell” project. The project will commemorate the centenary of the Battle of Passchendaele, 1917 by focusing on the stories of Portsmouth people who participated in one of the worst conflicts […]
Port Towns and Urban Cultures is delighted to be working in partnership with the Kings Theatre. With the help of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Gateways to the First World War public engagement centre Katrina Henderson, Learning and Community Engagement Officer, was put in touch with Gateways collaborators Professor Brad Beaven and Dr Melanie Bassett from the University […]
‘Sailortown’ is often described as a liminal space, the border between land and sea, work and home. Writing in 1923, C. Fox Smith highlighted this with ‘Dockland, strictly speaking, is of no country—or rather it is of all countries.’[1] There are few places where one can see the rise and fall of this phenomenon so […]
On the 11th November Britain will be commemorating Remembrance Day. To mark the event Brad Beaven and Mel Bassett will be talking about their research project ‘Mapping Jutland casualties’ at a ‘Gateways to the First World War’ Conference at the University of Kent. See the programme here: 11th-november-programme This project investigates the impact of the Battle […]
Port Towns & Urban Cultures: International Histories of the Waterfront, c.1700 – 2000, Eds. Brad Beaven, Karl Bell and Robert James, (Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2016) Despite the port’s prominence in maritime history, its cultural significance has long been neglected in favour of its role within economic and imperial networks. Defined by their intersection of maritime […]
