Hornsey 1968: The Art School Revolution by Lisa Tickner
Frances Lincoln, £12.99; 208pp

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WHILE IT WAS Grosvenor Square that attracted the cameras, the closest Britain got to the 1968 Zeitgeist was an event a few miles to the north. Crouch End may now be a gentrified suburb full to bursting with media folk, but in the late Sixties it was no fancier than Tooting, Willesden or Penge. All it had to recommend it was a rather attractive clock tower, and the Hornsey Art School on Crouch End Hill.

Founded in 1880, it became the Hornsey College of Arts and Crafts in 1955 and began to blossom; Gerda Flockinger, who taught jewellery, described it as “a sort of English Bauhaus”. In May 1968, the Hornsey Student Action Committee decided to occupy the building, initially for 24 hours, but eventually holding out for several weeks in the hope of student representation in the running of the college. They took over day-to-day operations with help from sympathetic lecturers, and produced newsletters and artwork with an overworked Gestetner machine.

The sit-in had a high media profile - visiting speakers included Buckminster Fuller, Joan Littlewood, Nikolaus Pevsner and R.D. Laing. Henry Moore donated money to the college's cause. All of this was a red rag to the Conservative Haringey councillors. By July 4, the local authority fenced in the students, placing them under siege after surrounding the building with security guards and dogs.

Meanwhile the students had organised an exhibition at the ICA called Hornsey Strikes Again; Tickner describes it as “part installation, part teach-in, part mobile canteen”. A national conference on art education was organised at the Roundhouse. It concluded that the Hornsey experiment was “a live laboratory worth any number of textbooks”.

Tickner's style is detached and unromantic. She is conscious of keeping the Hornsey affair separate from the other political upheavals of the time. While some “argued for the wholesale transformation of art education”, Tickner has sympathy with others who felt the college had become the victim of “an international conspiracy seizing on the college's reputation as a means of fermenting student unrest”. A talk from Tariq Ali, she records, met with a cool response.

As for the cohesive aims of the students, “among a plethora of documents there is none that maps in detail a sample curriculum”. The sit-in dissolved soon after the building was fenced in. Some lecturers and many students were not readmitted when the college finally reopened in November (one radical lecturer was Kim Howells, who went on to become a minister under Tony Blair). Tickner makes no attempts to analyse or find meaning in the sit-in's ultimate failure, but covers the facts in great detail, preparing the ground for a historian with a stronger sense of drama.

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