At Goldsmiths, learning goes deeper than creating pretty things, says Leon Eckert, who finished his BA in design in 2015. “We critically questioned the world around us, and produced work with a clear position within and towards it,” he says. “What stood out most was the people. They don’t just come together to teach and get taught, but to exchange ideas, critique and advise.”
Goldsmiths has long enjoyed a reputation as a creative powerhouse, whose alumni shape our cultural world. Mary Quant, inventor of the miniskirt, studied here, as did punk maestro Malcolm McLaren, artists Damien Hirst and Sam Taylor-Johnson (formerly Taylor-Wood), and Steve McQueen, director of 12 Years a Slave. But Goldsmiths offers courses across the board – including computing, management, education, psychology and much more. They’re all delivered with the unique slant that means creative thinking is encouraged, whatever the subject.
The Goldsmiths Prize, established in 2013, is typical of this thinking: it rewards fiction that pushes boundaries. “It’s picking away at certain established traditions that nobody was picking away at before,” says Tim Parnell, senior lecturer in English, and literary director of the prize. “That ethos is most particularly associated with fine art and the Young British Artists – a sense of creative and intellectual risk and daring. But I think there’s a sense of it across our courses.”
Former student Jeremy Young enrolled on his MA in creative and cultural entrepreneurship to develop his idea for a business. “I was scared, lacked confidence, and felt lost at sea in terms of where to start,” he remembers. “Over the course of my MA, I learned how to overcome that lack of self-confidence, to embrace risk and uncertainty and turn it into opportunity, and I acquired the tools to start a business without a tried-and-trusted model out there. Uniquely at Goldsmiths, the classroom is embedded into your life as a creative worker, not the other way around.”
Situated in New Cross, in the London borough of Lewisham, Goldsmiths is close to the centre of the capital. But being south of the river Thames gives it what Parnell calls a “peculiar, other-side-of-the-tracks energy”. For Guy Stevenson, postdoctoral research associate in the English and Comparative Literature department, the location makes it a more exciting and interesting place to learn. “Look at the recent emergence of Peckham and Camberwell as centres of experimental music,” he says.
Lewisham is a borough rich in diversity – different nationalities, backgrounds, races, languages and cultures all meet and thrive here – and Goldsmiths seeks to reflect that.
“We’re a prestigious university in the heart of south-east London, and a lot of our students are local people,” says Anna Carlile, senior lecturer and admissions tutor for the BA in education, culture and society in the Educational Studies department.
“About 85% of our students are the first in their families to go to university,” she adds. “We encourage them to see their life experiences as huge areas of expertise, not problems. That life knowledge, as a local person, is highly prized at Goldsmiths. We don’t just see them as making an investment in their own personal careers and futures – they’re making an investment in the community as well.”
Goldsmiths benefits from being a smaller university on a single site: it’s a hub where, unusually, the teaching, learning and support facilities are in one place. Because of this, it feels more intimate. “There are no discernible walls between staff and students, or students and visiting speakers,” says award-winning novelist Ross Raisin, who teaches on the same creative writing MA he studied 15 years ago. “You’re an individual, but an individual within a group, which is vital for a process like creative writing, where you are learning to give and receive creative feedback.”
Stevenson agrees. “There’s a stronger relationship here between the students and the lecturers than I’ve seen elsewhere, and a sense that lecturers want to learn from their students.”
Encouraging students to push themselves, challenge others and experiment with new formats and production techniques is also a vital skill, says Linda Lewis, broadcaster, senior lecturer, and convenor of the MA in television journalism. “Challenging the accepted ways of doing things is all part of the journalistic mentality, as well as not taking no for an answer,” she says. “And yes, that does mean challenging teachers and pushing back, which can at times feel a little uncomfortable. But for me, being made to justify why I have asserted something, or provide evidence to back up a statement, is part and parcel of modelling good journalistic behaviour.”
All this takes place within state-of-the-art facilities. The Professor Stuart Hall building is equipped with everything media students need to produce projects for photography, TV, radio or the internet, including darkrooms, production rooms and editing equipment, and there are pioneering sound studios and a commercial-standard recording studio for music students. Art and design students have dedicated studio space, and a £2.9m performance and teaching centre (including a 200-seat theatre) for theatre and performance students is opening soon. There’s also a library that’s open 24/7 nearly every day of the year. The university is opening the Goldsmiths Contemporary Art Gallery in September, and the Curzon Goldsmiths cinema shows the latest blockbusters, as well as harder-to-find independents.
In short, it’s the place to be right now. “If I had to name one place in the world where I belong, heart and mind, it is Goldsmiths,” says sociology and politics graduate Elettra Bianchi Dennerlein. “The people and professors I’ve met, together with Goldsmiths’ radical soul, have made these three years a transformative experience that is now helping me shape the path for my future.”
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