Website History

History of this archive

The origin of this archival project lies in the rather chequered history of the survival and subsequent mistaken disposal of the Cockpit’s laminated exhibitions. When the Inner London Education Authority was abolished by Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government in 1988, the exhibitions produced at the Cockpit Arts Workshop were transferred to Camerawork, who agreed to tour them along with their own exhibitions. When Camerawork folded due to the withdrawal of Arts Council funding, Four Corners Film Collective agreed to store both sets of exhibitions, where they stayed in a store room until 2007, when Four Corners moved premises.

Shirley Read, a former member of Camerawork, arranged with Andrew Dewdney the transfer of twenty-seven exhibitions in their laundry boxes to be stored in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at London South Bank University. They stayed there until 2012, when during repair works to the room they were being stored in, they were mistakenly disposed of.

Fortunately, six of the Camerawork exhibitions were held by Shirley Read, and a few others had been retrieved by their producers, whilst Andrew Dewdney and Claire Grey had slides and related material for the Cockpit exhibitions. The university agreed to pay seven thousand pounds in compensation to try and retrieve some of what was lost, and Matthew Ward, in the Photography Department of City Lit College, agreed to copy the remaining material and design a website.

In 2016 Four Corners Film and Photography applied for and was successfully awarded a Heritage Lottery Grant to produce an oral history and online archive of Camerawork. In the ensuing discussions between the two archival projects, a complete set of slides of the Cockpit exhibitions, produced by Tony Hall, who had worked at Cockpit part-time, were discovered.

Since starting the archival project, a decision between Claire Grey, Andrew Dewdney and Shirley Reed was taken in 2021, to separate the Cockpit and Camerawork material leading to the creation the Cockpit Touring Exhibition website.

Over the last two years more material has been unearthed relating to the projects undertaken by the Cultural Studies Department at the Cockpit between 1974 and 1990. This has led to us expanding on our original decision to just make the laminated exhibition panels accessible. We have decided to add contextual material relating to projects, courses and collaborations related to the Gallery project. The current website, very much a work-in-progress, has been renamed to reflect the wider scope of material, together with new navigational headings and introductory texts.

The archive is under construction and is still not a complete record of the output of the Cockpit.

The remaining administrative paperwork of the Gallery is archived at the University of the Arts Archives and Special Collections Centre. It was found with the Camerawork files in four filing cabinets at Four Corners in 2007. Shirley Read contacted Dr Janice Hart at the London College of Communications who accepted the papers for PARC (Photography and Archive Research Centre) which was directed by Val Williams. PARC’s archive came to the University of the Arts archive in 2019.