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Having spent most of my life in London, I have come to realise how much this city has to teach us: not just in its vast array of museums (from National Galleries to pop-up exhibitions), but also through our everyday interactions with the city\u2019s streets and citizens. When I took over the Literature in the City<\/a>\u00a0module, I wanted to draw on London as a tool to enhance our classroom experience.<\/p>\n I therefore decided to map the literature we studied onto the spaces they described. Virginia Woolf\u2019s walk down the Strand, Charles Dickens\u2019s encounters in St. Giles, W.B. Yeats\u2019s melancholy on Fleet Street, all these spaces are central to the text we study. These writers create a window into a rich and deeply imagined terrain, and it is one that is right outside the main entrance to King\u2019s. Encountering these spaces in conjunction with the literature itself, offers not only a deep sense of what this writing is trying to express, but also \u2013 and, perhaps, more crucially \u2013 just how much London has evolved!<\/p>\n There is a creative element to all our wanderings through the city \u2013 James Joyce certainly discovered as much in his journeys through Dublin \u2013 and so I actively encourage students to record their experience of the sites we visit. We pause at our locations, writing personal responses that capture the similarities and differences with the literature we have studied. \u2018If we turn and go past the anchored ships towards London\u2019, do we still see what Woolf called \u2018the most dismal prospect in the world\u2019? For some, contemporary London\u2019s glass skyline reiterates Woolf\u2019s point. For others it shows a glowing metropolis and a global icon.<\/p>\n One of the final essay questions is designed to critically evaluate these creative encounters. It was a mode of assessment I adapted from some undergraduate teaching at King\u2019s. But this summer school has also informed<\/em> my wider teaching at the University \u2013 not least in opening up the classroom. While our timetable directs us to the lecture hall, what better way to learn about, say, the London Blitz than by scouring the city for its legacy? (Bloomsbury, you should know, has a lot to offer!) Probing through the layers of London\u2019s history is often a difficult task, but the places such as the Museum of London are filled with objects that can help to resurrect the past.<\/p>\n It is because of these experiences on the summer school, that the mantra \u201cthe city is my classroom\u201d has become a recurrent phrase in so much of my teaching at King\u2019s. Be it through explorations in disused tube stations or trips to the Black Cultural Archives, getting out into the city has become integral to my ability to teach the complexities and changes London has to offer.<\/p>\n \u00a0By Dr George Legg<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Having spent most of my life in London, I have come to realise how much this city has to teach us: not just in its vast array of museums (from National Galleries to pop-up exhibitions), but also through our everyday … Continue reading