She was known as Miss Cook, never Joyce. When Miss Cook was training to be a speech therapist in the late 1940s, her tutors were elocutionists and performers. The profession was just getting established. In her first job, Miss Cook remembers a nurse greeting her; ‘How now brown cow.’ Her eyes flash. ‘I said, ‘I ...
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Anne Neale, currently the Peer Support & Volunteer Co-ordinator at the Crossroads Women’s Centre, talked to us in May 2018. She spoke about the history of the centre, which began in 1975 as a squat in Drummond Street, near Euston Station. Frequently displaced due to redevelopment and rising rents, the centre later spend 17 happy years ...
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Dr. Julia Pascal is a prize-winning Jewish atheist playwright and theatre director. After training and working as an actor in major theatres including The Royal Court Theatre, Nottingham Playhouse, and The Royal Shakespeare Company, she turned her hand to directing becoming the first woman director at the National Theatre. Her plays focus on politics and ...
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Sarah Walker first came across the English Collective of Prostitutes at the North London Polytechnic, where she was studying English, in the early 1980s. In May 2018, Sarah and I sat down to record her memories of the ECP occupation of the Holy Cross Church in King’s Cross in 1982. Sarah talked about the political ...
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Lucy Neal has been ‘making art as if the world mattered’ ever since co-founding the London International Theatre Festival (LIFT) in 1981. LIFT brought participation, pyrotechnics and polyrhythms into the public realm, creating spaces for practitioners who were censored in their own countries. ‘Places remember events’ says Lucy, and Kings Cross was full of them. ...
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Professor Wendy Savage, member of the Medical Ethics Committee (BMA MEC, Tavistock Square), is an outspoken advocate for women’s choice and health care rights. We sit side by side in her Clerkenwell apartment, surrounded by blue-green prints of wild landscapes. Wendy looks out through the windows while talking, as if finding worrying statistics and complicated ...
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Cecilia Anim knew she wanted to be a ‘big wife’ (a midwife) after she heard babies crying in a maternity hospital in Kumasi. Her nursing story began there. She is now serving her second term as President of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) – the first person of BAME origin elected to the office. ...
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Prof. Joanna Zakrzewska confessed she hadn’t noticed the brass owls adorning the doors of the Eastman Dental Hospital (EDH), until one of her patients depicted heavy rocks tumbling through the doors as part of an art collaboration. Learning from patients, attention to detail and imagery are the big themes of my conversation with Joanna. We ...
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Amy Lamé (b. 1971), founder of legendary gay club Duckie, ended up as a resident of King’s Cross when she married a vicar, Jenny. The flat in Bloomsbury came with her wife’s job in the Anglican Church. Amy discovered it once housed orphaned girls from the Foundling Hospital, who were training as domestic servants. The ...
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