In the Shadow of Senate House is a series of events taking place in and around Birkbeck College, University of London in Autumn/Winter 2009. Birkbeck sits literally in the shadow of Senate House on Russell Square. Our research also has the monolith’s shadow cast across it in various ways, for we are all investigating modern and contemporary city fabric and the politics and poetics of inhabiting urban space. Victoria McNeile is writing a social and cultural history of Russell Square. Owen Hatherley is exploring the political aesthetics of modernist building. Henderson Downing is following the trails of paranoid city stalker Iain Sinclair. In addition, we are users of the library, but we also pass through the building on our journeys through Bloomsbury.

We are all fascinated in the everyday and extraordinary activities that happen around its fringes – the clatter of suitcases as people struggle to and from the many hotels; the historical rustles in the bushes at Russell Square; the distant echo of Chartists gathering in the square on 10 April 1848; the alternative institutions in the shadows from the marginalised religious sects to today’s non-academic academies; ‘the School of Life’ on Marchmont St or ‘Aquarium’ on Woburn Place or the ‘Public Reading Rooms’, further down on Caledonian Road; occultist Bloomsbury; the urban legends that attach to the building and re-circulate – Hitler’s headquarters, bunkers in the basement, troglodytes in the tube line. What we propose is a multiple stranded exploration – which does not attempt to tell an official history of the building, but rather to see how the building has produced or obliterated modes of life in its shadow. (This is, in a sense, an imaginative pre-empting of what might yet come to be our actual exclusion from the building, if certain moves are made within the University of London). This is not simply an examination of Senate House, but rather the building is a stand from which to hang a number of themes pertinent to living, studying and passing through an old Moderne city.