Tobacco packaging collected by Barbara Jones. Photo: University of Brighton Design Archives.

On 16 June the Curatorial Director and Deputy Curator will each be speaking at events with an urban focus. Catherine Moriarty at ‘The City as Modernist Ephemera’ at London South Bank University and Lesley Whitworth at ‘Architecture, Citizenship, Space: British Architecture from the 1920s to the 1970s’ at Oxford Brookes University.

Lesley Whitworth’s invited presentation examines the role of place-making in Design Council spatial practices, and its use of selected products to stimulate a dynamic engagement between it and emergent publics, with the implication that purchasing interactions with all new products were critically charged and an act of faith in a socially engaged modernism.

In stark contrast, Catherine Moriarty will be talking about bus tickets and bingo cards. Hosted by the School of Arts and Creative Industries the South Bank event explores ‘the tensions arising out of the ephemeral and eternal aspects of the ‘modernist city’ through spaces, works, events, artefacts and people.’ Moriarty’s fascination with the concerns, enthusiasms and strategies of artist and writer Barbara Jones shape her chapter ‘Popular art, Pop Art, and ‘the boys who turn out the fine arts’’ in the forthcoming volume Pop Art & Design, edited by Anne Massey and Alex Seago, to be published by Bloomsbury later this year. Meanwhile, this keynote looks a little more closely at the Rizla packets and sweet wrappers that can be found in Jones’s archive, objects that she understood as integral to postwar urban experience.