麻豆社

Royal Holloway College 1896 and 2016. What does the choice of interior design of a student bedroom there reveal about who the students are and how they behave? Or were supposed to behave?

Presenter Ellie Cawthorne examines a remarkable set of nineteenth century photographs of student study rooms with college archivist Annabel Valentine, and visits some of the students living in exactly the same study rooms in the 21st century.

She discovers how fears of female education and emancipation affected the design of student living quarters, and how students past and present transformed their private living quarters into public display spaces.

Hand made lightshades, Japanese fans, taxidermy, generic posters of Pulp Fiction and the New York Skyline, the student bedroom was - and still is - the canvas for generations of students to construct and communicate their new student identities.

Producer: Lucy Dichmont
Series Producer: Nick Baker
A Testbed production for 麻豆社 Radio 4.