Student protest remembered 40 years on

This from the Hornsey & Crouch End Journal:

The Art revolution that rocked Hornsey in 1968 is remembered next week with a special anniversary marking 40 years since students formed a mass sit-in.

High profile former students of Hornsey Art College - including foreign minister Kim Howells - will be joining a host of former "rebels" at Middlesex University on Wednesday.

Described once as "a few north London crackpots", the six-week protest erupted over a clash on control of student funding and grew into a debate on art education.

A bitter spat ensued with the then Conservative-run Haringey Council.

Lisa Tickner, former college student and author of Hornsey 1968 The Art School Revolution, visited the sit-in.

She said: "A lot of people that I spoke to felt it had been the most exciting art experience of their lives and it really changed them. They did it with a sense of pageantry."

More than 800 students filled the college, where the new Coleridge Primary School site is now located. The outcome is ambiguous - the old regime was restored yet it is widely held the protest instigated a tide of change.

Distancing itself from the Paris riots of the same year where buildings were set on fire and police crushed, Hornsey students held peaceful meetings and brought policemen cups of tea.

She continued: "When we talk now about an occupation we imagine people locking the doors and putting their feet up, but it wasn't like that. It was very intense."

Haringey TUC chairman Keith Flett said of the commemoration: "We think it is appropriate to remember Haringey's radical past, and in particular in May the role that the borough played in the upheavals of 1968."

Ms Tickner, now a visiting professor at the Courtauld Institute in west London, will be talking at the anniversary alongside MP Dr Howells.