Explore Culture, History & Humanities Courses

London has been shaped by war, conflict and unrest. It's buildings, monuments and even street names reflect our embattled past. These walks examine London's wartime legacy from mediaeval fortifications to the War on Terror.



London guide: Eleanor Jackson



First lecture will be delivered via zoom followed by 8 guided walks.

There were a significant number of highly talented female artists active during the 15th to 18th centuries, so why is their work not more famous? This course investigates and redresses this gender inequality.

This course will develop your critical appreciation of the cinema by teaching you how to read and understand film texts. We will look at the elements that underpin film form – narrative, mise en scène, cinematography, editing and sound – alongside its historical development. We will consider film style by exploring classical, post-classical and art cinema and we will examine influential critical modes of analysis, such as genre, authorship and spectatorship.

We explore a brief and careful selection of recent novels in English, considering aspects of literature and the lives of writers, examining the contemporary perspective from which we reread and reinterpret classic texts to bridge the gap between past and present. Writers include Edward St Aubyn, Kathy O’Shaughnessy, Hari Kunzru, Malaysian novelist Tan Twan Eng, and British-Palestinian Isabella Hammad.

Not sure whether creative writing is for you? Give it a try on one of these fun and supportive short courses covering the basics of fiction and poetry. Increase your confidence and produce work through guided exercises and discussion.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

Discover the work of selected British artists whose innovative practice shaped the development of modern art in Britain from the 1950s to the 1970s. Explore how and why the ideas and themes behind their work continue to be relevant to today’s audiences.

We look at the history of everyday objects such as forks and spectacles and pastimes including playing cards, and swimming.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

A course of walking tours of London’s West End showing its development from the seventeenth century, how its profile has ebbed and flowed, looking at it through specific themes.



First meeting place: Covent Garden tube, outside exit on James Street.

Come and join us at the Cultureplex Ciné-Club, where once a week, for 12 weeks (and throughout the academic year), we will watch and discuss film. Taking its cue from the famous Parisian ciné-club set up by the celebrated critic and writer, André Bazin, ‘the single thinker most responsible for bestowing on cinema the prestige both of an artform and of an object of knowledge’, and the man who foresaw the emergence of film studies as a legitimate discipline of academic study, our contemporary incarnation of the film club will offer a curated series of films for detailed study, discussion and debate. Each film will be introduced, placed in both its cinematic, cultural and historic context. In sharing our viewing in City Lit’s premier screening room, the Cultureplex, we will approximate the experience of watching film in the cinema, one that is intense and fully focussed in a way that other modes of viewing often are not. After the screening we will devote the rest of the class to a collective exploration of the film, led by the tutor, but involving everyone in a participatory discussion that will allow all to express their responses, their views, their thoughts on the film screened.

This course introduces you to a range of prose and poetry from the nineteenth century to the present. Learn about how poems work, both ‘on the page’ and as spoken words. Reading novels and short stories, we’ll explore characterisation, the social and historical contexts of the works and writers’ techniques. Come and discover what’s distinctive about different forms of literature.