Madeleine Pelling: Writing on the Wall

Sunday 17 November, 3.30 - 4.30pm, QUAD Derby

What if walls could talk? For historian Madeleine Pelling, they can - if you know where to look. Subtitled: “Graffiti, Rebellion and the Making of Eighteenth-Century Britain”, Madeleine has written a brilliant new cultural history of the long 18th century.

Writing on the Wall is told through the marks its citizens left behind, bringing into focus lost voices from the highest to the lowest in society. From the centre of London to the islands of the Caribbean, she goes in search of graffiti, evidence of how ordinary people experienced the world-changing events that defined their lives - from political prisoners to sex workers, homesick sailors, Romantic poets and the artisans of the industrial revolution.

Here are lives, loves, triumphs and failures, scratched into the walls of prisons and latrines, chalked up on doors and etched into windows. The names of their creators may be lost to history, but together they tell the real story of Britain's most rebellious and transformative century.

Madeleine will be in conversation with Dr Ruth Larsen, Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Derby.

This event will be filmed and made available as a digital recording after the Festival. For more information please click here.

Please note that we anticipate that parking will be unavailable at the Assembly Rooms car park as demolition work will have started by November. Alternative parking is available on streets around the Cathedral area and in other public car parks including Chapel Street and Bold Lane.