Ideas Alive – The Morecambe Winter Gardens: Contested Histories

Professor Vanessa Toulmin - School of English and Director of City, Culture and Public Engagement

2 November, 2025 at 6:00 pm

The Morecambe Winter Gardens is a Grade 2* Listed Theatre.  For five years Professor Vanessa Toulmin has been the Chair of the Preservation Trust responsible for raising over £4.4 Million pounds of funding to stabilise the building and restore its important features. Vanessa discusses the contested history of the venue, placing it in the wider context of 20th century performance studies and examining previously unknown histories that reveal a different narrative to the standard seaside variety hall that it has been placed within.

Ideas Alive is a series of podcasts by academics from the University of Sheffield talking about their fascinating research. A podcast link will go live on the festival website on the date and time publicised. Once live the episode can be listened to anytime, with other episodes from the series, on the University of Sheffield Player