Memories of Debenhams / Reflected Histories: A Department Store of the Imagination

In this post Dr Ed Barrett, a former postgraduate student at the University of Gloucestershire, discusses his work and exhibition which will take place from 13th to 27th March in the gallery space at City Campus. 

For decades, a great department store lay at the heart of the city of Gloucester – first known as Bon Marché, and more recently as Debenhams – and provided a space for the community to come together. Friends could meet in its restaurant, and the staff knew each other more as a family than as a workforce, forging connections that last a lifetime. The building is now the University of Gloucestershire’s new City Campus, and the site’s legacy is being celebrated in the Memories of Debenhams project.

Project manager Clair Greenaway, Gloucestershire’s course leader for Events Management, along with some of my postgraduate colleagues from History – Cara Hall, Layla Harrison, and David Morgan – collected oral histories from people who had been involved with the store, along with some generous donations of other materials such as photographs, ephemera, and artefacts.

The joint exhibition will consist of selected boards from the original Memories of Debenhams exhibition, with my creative response – Reflected Histories: A Department Store of the Imagination.

For the project, I integrated aspects of the oral histories with archaeological and archival materials related to the site, creating four new illustrations exploring continuities of site usage across the centuries.

These illustrations encourage viewers to engage imaginatively with ideas about the site’s histories, interpreting their own narratives onto my images, and hopefully creating resonances between their own experiences and knowledge and what they think the past may have been like.

I include hints towards narratives in the images, but I want the viewer themself to decide those narratives and who the characters are and what happens next. In addition to my four new illustrations, the exhibition will also contain my notes and workings-out, demonstrating how drawing can be used as a research method for history.

For details about the exhibition see here: https://voicesgloucester.org.uk/events/memories-of-debenhams/