Dr John Price

John is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and a Member of the British Academy Hearth Tax Project Management Committee. He is the Chair of the Greater London Local History Committee of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society, and Chair of the Friends of the Watts Memorial, an organization responsible for protecting an important piece of London’s history.

John is a custodian for the Museum Archive of the Lewisham Local History Society and the Director of the Museum of Everyday Life which works with the archive.

John is an active practitioner of Public History and Applied History and he conceives and leads highly impactful Civic, Public, and Community Engagement and Knowledge Exchange projects.

In Living Memory: A People's History of Postwar Lewisham
In Living Memory celebrated Lewisham’s diversity and heritage for London Borough of Culture 2022. It empowered Lewisham’s communities to tell their own stories, presenting them through traditional means as well as artistic and cultural activities and events. The In Living Memory projects uncovered a range of exciting histories that are for, about, and by the people of Lewisham. People’s History is an inclusive, democratic, and empowering enterprise, and these projects produced histories that are as diverse and inspirational as Lewisham itself.

Museum of Everyday Life
The Museum of Everyday Life is an online archive and museum working with the Museum Collection of the Lewisham Local History Society. The Museum is a venue for entertainment, for learning, for revelations, and for the resurrection of memories through engagement with the past. The Museum engages with this extraordinary collection of historical objects, images, and ephemera, and has begun to make it digitally and informatively accessible for everyone. It demonstrate that the ‘everyday’ is valuable and insightful, that nothing and nobody is ever ‘ordinary’. It brings histories of the everyday to life, informing and educating people about the past in innovative and entertaining ways.

Windrush: Arrival 1948
This project started as an exhibition at Goldsmiths, conceived and curated by Dr John Price in collaboration with Will Cenci, Public Engagement Manager. Based on a new transcription of the Windrush passenger list held at The National Archives, 1,027 individual landing cards representing each passenger who arrived on the MV Empire Windrush at Tilbury docks on 22 June 1948 were created. The landing cards reflect a single pivotal moment in the life of each passenger; a snapshot of hope, opportunity and uncertainty. The Windrush passenger landing cards used in the exhibition have been reimagined and recreated to represent those destroyed by the Home Office in 2010. Following the initial exhibition, the content was reproduced across numerous other outputs with various partners.

Remembering the Battle of Lewisham
To mark the 40th anniversary of the events of 13 August 1977, Dr John Price embarked on a range of public engagement activities to initiate inclusive dialogues with different publics on how the ‘Battle of Lewisham’ should be remembered and its contemporary relevance. A collaboration with Goldsmiths public engagement team, the project culminated in the unveiling of a permanent monument to the ‘Battle of Lewisham’ and a community festival hosted at the Albany in Deptford. Other activities including art workshops, a public consultation, live music, poetry, exhibitions of contemporary art and photography, screenings, panel discussions, and history walks engaged a range of publics with a largely forgotten aspect of local history, shaping perceptions of the borough, and reaffirming its centrality to the history of race relations in the UK.