WHAT'S ON

London Region of U3As Talks: the LRU3A series of online talks has been extended in to 2021. You can see the programme here. Details of how to register for each talk is also in that publicity flyer.

National Winter Programme: there is also now a series of online activities offered by The Third Age Trust. This covers a wide range from painting, poetry reading, photography, etc. Details of this can be found here.

iU3A Monthly Meetings: for the two iU3A talks each month see the details below.
iU3A IT Support Meetings: every fortnight, see the group page for details here: IT Support Group

Wednesday 05 May, 2.30pm: What’s going on in Brazil? Our Current Affairs 2 group invites you to join their meeting to learn about Brazil. Dr Matthew Richmond has agreed to talk to us, providing country information and an analysis of the current political situation and the impact of the Covid 19 pandemic. Dr Richmond is a Research Fellow at the London School of Economics Latin America and Caribbean Centre and is Secretary of the Latin American Geographies Working Group of the UK Royal Geographical Society. He researches urban development, governance and subjectivity formation in Latin American cities, with a focus on Brazil. He has completed postdoctorates at the Centro de Estudos da Metrópole and the Universidade Estadual Paulista, both in São Paulo, Brazil.  Zoom details will be issued through the Bulletin.  Any queries to currentaffairs2.iu3a@gmail.com

Wednesday 02 June: National u3a Day: this is definitely going ahead. We hope to join in these celebrations in various ways. We will be hosting some external affairs to attract new members, but we'll also have some internal events for all our members — running throughout the day. Dip in and out of the day's programme as you want. Details of the programme to be published shortly.
Come and support us and help sign up new members — Sunday 30 May, Chapel Market, from 10.00.


Wednesday 23 June: Summer Party: this will be just after the last of the Government Covid lockdown restrictions are removed so we'll have plenty to celebrate. Tickets will go on sale shortly. Details to follow. 

Some things to look forward to:
Quizzes — we (Mary) plan to run these quarterly throughout this year.
Clues Trails — we (Elizabeth and Derek) will run two clues trails in 2021 when circumstances allow.

Monthly Meetings, Speakers Programme
Our physical Monthly Meetings have been suspended due to Covid-19 but instead we have created a programme of speakers who will present to us online using Zoom. How long the programme will run like this will depend on the unwinding rate of lockdown.

New feature: if you want to come early for a chat with fellow members you can join the meeting at 9.30. You will then be placed in a 'breakout room' with a few other members just so you can say hello. We hope this might fill a gap caused previously by moving our physical Monthly Meetings online.

The main Talk will start at 10.00am and run to 11.00 — see the details below. It's suggested you log in and join the meeting at least five minutes before the scheduled start time. There will only be the one topic, the main speaker. The Zoom invitation to these meetings will be sent to all members in the Bulletin.

DATE	MONTHLY MEETING PROGRAMME:
13 May	Sarah Corn: The Old Operating Theatre Museum & Herb Garret: a Contemporary Approach to Curating. Sarah is the Director of the Old Operating Theatre Museum and Herb Garret, and she will take us through the fascinating (and slightly gory) history of the oldest surviving operating theatre in Europe, housed since 1822 in the attic of the old St Thomas’ Hospital. She has a number of other roles, including as Trustee of Farnham Maltings, Founding Trustee of a new cultural community hub ‘@ the Lit’ in Surrey, and up until recently, was Curator of the Egham Museum and co-chair of the ‘Network for Change’ for women leaders in museums. To all of these she brings her belief in making museums strong, healthy and vibrant and she will explore with us what that means.
27 May	Lis Howell: There are fewer than you think: why expert women are under-represented on the news. Survey research by City University's Department of Journalism over the last ten years has shown that male experts interviewed on the news outnumber women by nearly three to one.  And it used to be much worse! Before this research and the campaign which followed it there were an astonishing six times as many men as women on the news. Why are authoritative women so under-represented? Lis Howell has researched this controversial topic for over a decade and has some uncomfortable as well as informative answers. Emeritus Professor Lis Howell retired from City University in 2018 but still directs the Expert Women Project which counts and reports the number of women authority figures on six major news programmes. She is an award winning journalist and broadcasting executive who has worked for all the major news channels, winning a Royal Television Society award with ITN for coverage of the Lockerbie disaster. She was Managing Editor of Sky News and the first female Head of News at ITV.
10 June	David Edgerton: The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: a Twentieth Century History. David will present a new view of twentieth-century British history, one which makes better sense of the past, and to some extent the present, than conventional views. Most British histories are concerned with the rise and fall of the welfare state, and also the decline (and occasionally later supposed rise) of the economy. More recently some historians have wanted to see Empire as the key theme in British history. Edgerton rejects all these approaches as partial and often misleading. In their place he puts a multi-faceted story of a nation which emerges out of a broader British Empire only in 1945, of a place which was truly exceptional in its internationalism and industrialisation in 1900 (though not in its imperialism) but was no longer so after the 1950s, of a place which saw radical discontinuities rather than continuities. This leads to fresh understandings of the nature of the welfare state, of the economy, of the nature of Thatcherism, and indeed of possible historical explanations of Brexit. David Edgerton teaches in the History Department at King's College London, where he is Hans Rausing Professor of the History of Science and Technology and Professor of Modern British History. He was the founding director of the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine now at King's College London. He chairs King's Contemporary British History, and is a co-director of the Sir Michael Howard Centre for the History of War. He was educated at St. John's College Oxford and Imperial College London, and has taught at the University of Manchester and Imperial College London. Among his books are England and the Aeroplane (1991, 2013), Warfare State (2005), The Shock of the Old (2006, 2019), and most recently The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History (Penguin, 2019). He writes regularly for the Guardian and the New Statesman.
24 June	Sue Palmer: The Soanes at Home: Pitzhanger Manor. Sue Palmer is the Archivist and Head of Library Services at Sir John Soane’s Museum (www.soane.org), where she has worked for over thirty years. She is the author of At Home with the Soanes: Upstairs, Downstairs in 19th Century London (Pimpernel Press, 2015), a book that explores the Soane family’s domestic life at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. For her talk she will focus more on their life at Pitzhanger Manor, Ealing, which was their country home for ten years from 1800. Pitzhanger Manor has recently been restored and is open to the public (subject to Covid restrictions). By 1800 the 47-year old architect Sir John Soane (1753-1837) felt well enough established to purchase a country house for weekend and summer entertaining. He had inherited a considerable fortune from his wife’s uncle in 1790 and had held the prestigious post of architect to the Bank of England since 1788. He also had an eye to the future of his young sons John and George, who he hoped would follow him into the architectural profession. He settled on Pitzhanger Manor at Ealing, then a village six miles to the west of London, a house with an estate of 28 acres, including a stream well stocked with fish where he could indulge one of his favourite pastimes and where the boys had the freedom to roam that they lacked in the family’s terraced town house at 12 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Picture © Sir John Soane's Museum.
08 July

Dates of Future Monthly Meetings/Speakers beyond the above are:
24 June, 08 July, 22 July, 12 August, 26 August, 09 September, 23 September, 14 October, 28 October, 11 November, 25 November, 09 December.

You can see either summary information about previous monthly meetings or the full presentation material (if we have received permission) on the following webpage: Past Meetings

Coffee Mornings

Moved online now: Our iU3A coffee mornings are a popular way of getting to know other members. They are on varying days of the week and are free to iU3A members. See the latest Bulletin for date of next coffee morning.

Our coffee mornings are organised by Sally Fox. To book up for any of the coffee mornings please email Sally here. She will then advise you that you are booked. If you can't attend a coffee morning you've booked for, please let us know by emailing Sally (same link as above) to say you can't now make it.
 

iU3A's pub lunches provide an opportunity for members to meet each other in a social atmosphere. They take place monthly, around Islington. If you are buying a lunch the cost is around £10 to £12 with drinks being extra. If you'd like to come along to one of these please email Howard Stone here for more information or to reserve your place.

All those held so far have attracted about 15 iU3A members, who've enjoyed some good chat. While originally conceived to attract more male members there has been good support from the women members. Do come along and join us.

Pub lunches are now a 'group' and details of their schedule can now be found in Beacon.