Foundations: Recovering the Lost History of Saturday Art and Design Classes 1945-1980s [Project Website]
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Kristensen, J C 
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2855-8746 and Appleford, Katherine
(2026)
Foundations: Recovering the Lost History of Saturday Art and Design Classes 1945-1980s [Project Website].
UNSPECIFIED.
(In Press)
Abstract
In the post-war reconstruction period in Britain, the importance of art and design for civic society was clearly recognised by the founding of the Design Council in 1944 and the Arts Council in 1945. In this context, Saturday Art and Design Classes (SADC) were born, a little-known initiative that enabled secondary school students aged 14-16 to attend their local art school and access a creative education outside of the traditional classroom. However, the history of this initiative is entirely missing from the historical record.
In the current climate, the need for these clubs is increasingly urgent. In 2025, it was reported that fewer than thirty students took A-Level Art in Tower Hamlets in 2024 (Weale, 2025). This sharp decline reflects a broader trend: a significant reduction in arts provision within state secondary education and a significant scaling back of Foundation Diplomas in Art and Design across the university sector.
The Foundations project seeks to reveal the history of these classes: how they operated, their role and importance in post-war Britain’s transformation, and their impact on individuals and creative institutions. Its purpose is to understand the history of students’ pathways into tertiary arts education and the creative industries through exploring historical initiatives to widen access to creative education. It reframes post-war British art education by demonstrating that extracurricular and locally embedded art school initiatives played a significant role in widening access to creative education and shaping pathways into the creative industries.
To uncover this lost history, this project combines archival research, institutional mapping with oral history interviews conducted with former attendees, situating these accounts within broader histories of British post-war art and design education.
This output is a project website, including maps of SADC and Art School locations, an image archive and a blog documenting the research process.
| Item Type: | Other |
|---|---|
| Additional Information: | This work is part of a larger project called Foundations and Vocabularies: Reframing Histories and Pedagogies of British Design Education. |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | Art and Design Education, Art School History, Creative Education, Art and Design History, Educational History, Arts Education, Cultural Policy, Saturday Art and Design Classes, Widening Participation, Postwar British History |
| Subjects: | L Education > L Education (General) L Education > LA History of education N Fine Arts > N Visual arts (General) For photography, see TR N Fine Arts > NC Drawing Design Illustration |
| Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group: | Faculty of Law, Arts and Social Sciences > School of Design and Creative Industries Faculty of Law, Arts and Social Sciences |
| Related URLs: | |
| Last Modified: | 20 May 2026 10:22 |
| URI: | https://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/53483 |
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