Event overview
LGBTQ+ South London history and drawing workshop. Any level of art experience, including none, is welcome. You will use a variety of drawing methods to recall queer pasts.
For Further details see: https://catherine-hahn.com/queer-along-the-river-1
Queer Along the River includes drawing, photography, audio and mapping workshops, walks and talks. The project culminates in a collaborative exhibition at Deptford Lounge in February 2026 for LGBTQ+ history month in February 2026.
This is an ongoing project mapping queer history in South London. It concentrates on the area between Southwark and Deptford in the 16th to early 20th century, drawing out the area’s diverse, migrant, working-class queer roots. The project emerged from mapping South East London, which is fraught with past connections. Powerful juxtapositions of land and water, market gardens, factories, tanning pits and imperial docks, summon its working-class and colonial inheritance.
Records reveal a diverse population, including African, Asian, Dutch, Flemish, French and Irish inhabitants from the 16th– 17th c.. Many of the rules of the city did not apply here, in particular in the outsider ‘liberties’ in Bridge Without (now part of Southwark). In the nineteenth century, whilst Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew mention local people with broader origins, a whitened, Anglicized, cis-heteronormative vision of South London has come to typify descriptions of its ‘slums’. Queer Along the River uses images to bring its wider history back.
Dr Catherine Hahn is an artist, social researcher and lecturer. She is currently a visiting Research and Knowledge Exchange Fellow at Goldsmiths with the Migrant Futures Institute and working on Queer Along the River. She has taught extensively in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths and Art History at Kent and is an alumnus of The Slade and Michaelis Fine Art schools. Her PhD is on the Iziko South African National Gallery: The Political House of Art (2016). Her publications include:
Hahn, C. (2025). British history at Tate Britain post-Brexit: Rich, white men and space invaders. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 28(5), 1228-1248.
Hahn, C. (2023). Reclaiming History in the British Museum entranceway: imperialism, patronage and female, queer and black legacies. Rethinking History, 27(2), 187–220.
Hahn, C. (2017). Nailing One’s Colours: Tate Britain’s Artist and Empire. Identities, 24(1), 26–33.
Museum With Walls https://exhibition.globalgrace.net/installation/museum-with-walls/
Hear Here: site-responsive podcast with Professor Nirmal Puwar, Coventry Cathedral https://www.juncture-digital.org/mattering-press/Hear-Here-Spatial-Practices/essays/catherine_hahn.md
This project is supported by the Migrant Futures Institute at Goldsmiths.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 19 Dec 2025 | 2:00pm - 4:00pm |
Accessibility
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