Explore Culture, History & Humanities Courses

Learn to write for the screen on this practical, introductory course. Writing exercises, presentations and screenings will teach you key skills, and you’ll begin to produce work and an outline for a full-length project.

Explore the fundamental techniques of writing for the stage in this introductory course. Get to grips with dialogue, character, story and structure, and start work on your own play.

Want to have a go at creative writing in a supportive environment? Join one of these introductory courses. Guided exercises will give you the tools to explore language creatively and find your own writing voice.

A study of the unique visual flavour of Byzantine art and architecture, the development of a range of craft industries, and the impact of Byzantium on other cultures.

The Victoria and Albert Museum has one of the finest and most comprehensive collections of European decorative arts in the world. This course aims to provide an introduction to these rich collections. It will focus on the period 1500 to 1900, but references later developments. The main media will be explored including textiles, ceramics, glass, metalwork, and silver.

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.

Come and join us at the Cultureplex Ciné-Club, where once a week, for 10 weeks, 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.