M. McCullick’s ‘Barrage Balloon backfield’ dated 1942 but still including the former Chapel tower which had been largely knocked down by a balloon removed from its moorings by a storm in October 1939.
This country and most of the world is at war with an invisible (to the eye) virus.
And most of the academics and students have been evacuated to their homes to work- apart from a skeleton group of staff providing basic services and looking after the buildings.
These are unprecedented times. We have to wind back the clock of history to September 1939 and the outbreak of World War Two for a comparison.
Goldsmiths had to carry out a complex, stressful and devastatingly disruptive exile to Nottingham University which lasted for seven years.
A sketch of fashion recommendations for Goldsmiths’ College students in The Smith magazine for Easter 1939. Image: Goldsmiths Archives
Many of the fashion conscious students soon had to surrender their individuality for the drab constancy of uniforms and make do and mend.
Not everyone left. A small group of Art School tutors and their students worked and lived through the Blitz and ravages of World War.
The College was never the same again.
Sights, sounds, culture and life familiar in 1939 would be lost and when there was a return in 1946, Goldsmiths, and indeed British Society, would be so different.
This three part series tells the story of evacuation, exile and return.
We begin with the crisis of a war of arms and not pestilence being declared Sunday 3rd September 1939.