Monday, 14-15 June, 2010, Sheffield Hallam University

This interdisciplinary conference engages with the writings of Ian Sinclair. Following his interest in London writers, it proposes a vision of London that concentrates on the marginal, the ‘lost’, and the ‘underground’. It takes an interdisciplinary form spanning the disciplines of history, English, film and architecture. The London it hopes to explore is an unstable and shifting one, that changes its meanings over time. The chronology is a long one, inviting comparisons across the geographical spaces of London and across disciplinary boundaries. Drawing on Iain Sinclair’s preoccupations with space, topography, the cinema of the capital and the lost history of the city, it aims to overturn accepted notions of London through an emphasis on the excluded. The conference will be held in conjunction with the Showroom cinema in Sheffield, and will open a week-long series of short films about London. These will be a series of films introduced by academic staff from Sheffield Hallam University at the Showroom Cinema. Iain Sinclair will be present and will deliver a keynote lecture on outsider culture in London and popular film making in the nineteen-sixties and seventies.

Papers are invited across the interdisciplinary barriers, and around the following key themes:

The writings of Iain Sinclair
The texts and histories of ‘lost London’
Psychogeography
Film making and the metropolis
London in the regions
Space and the geography of the capital
Subterranean London
‘The London that nobody knows’
Historical images of the excluded
Outsiders
Boundaries
Excluded communities
Regeneration and the Olympics

Abstracts of 250-300 words should be sent to the following: Tony Taylor, Tony.Taylor@shu.ac.uk and Martin Carter m.carter@shu.ac.uk by Friday 9 April 2010.