Author Archives: litadoolan

Discovering the Living Campus in Tooting

Some good news to share, quietly: my student-led proposal, Discovering the Living Campus, has been shortlisted for Stage 2 of the Student–Staff Partnership Grants (2026–27) at City St George’s, University of London. The panel called it distinctive, which was kind of them; to me it still feels like the simplest idea. Maybe because it began with […]
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Gower Street London: University Never Stood Still

Universities have become very conscious of the student experience. But architecture also reveals an idea. The old message could sometimes feel like: here is the institution; find your place within it. The newer buildings increasingly say: come in, sit down, stay for a while. That matters particularly in London, because its universities were never populated […]
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Review – The Shape of Things Undone

Camden Calling … Me?

A friend I had not seen since teenage years messaged me out of the blue. She was coming to London. She would not be in town for long but would like to meet even if it was for just 5 minutes. In a heartbeat the instinct was either this was something that got buried in […]
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What the camera held for ten years

There is a photograph in Åsa Johannesson’s exhibition at Stills in Edinburgh that stops you. Not because it shouts. Because it waits. Each portrait conveys something specific — a glance, a tiny tattoo, creases in a shirt, an awkward poise, a turned neck. These are not symbols. They are specifics. The particularity of a person […]
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Staging Alzheimer’s: A New Play About Memory, Care, and What We Leave Behind

Over the past year — working in my continuing bioinformatics research — I’ve found myself circling one question: What remains of us when memory falters, and who carries the fragments we lose? This question has become the seed of a new performance work: a play about Alzheimer’s, care, and the fragile rituals that preserve personhood […]
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Exploring Decay: Nature’s Unexpected Transformations – in Andy Goldsworthy’s Art

I am trying to get to Scotland to see an exhibition and they cancel my train because of Storm Floris. I read – as a result of the winds trees are felled on the Waverley Park. This felt like letting go of the past as I had seen that tree stood there for 30 years […]
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Unveiling Whispers from Number 9: A Lost Play Emerges

A play was scheduled to open in 1958.But the curtain never rose…The writer vanished.Only the title remained — Whispers from Number 9. AUTHOR’ LEFT A NOTE:“I wanted to write something not loud, but true — a silence you could feel between two people in armchairs. The war is over, but we are still rehearsing our […]
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A Farewell to Headington’s Starbucks — and a Quiet Thank You

Once a wedding dress shop, and before that—who knows—this Starbucks in Headington became something more than just a coffee shop. It became a constant. When our world shrank to brief walks this shop stayed open.  A smile behind a visor, and a feeling that life still carried on.   A place that held us quietly […]
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Rosalind Franklin, A Future of Discovery at Guy’s

Today, July 25, marks the birth anniversary of Rosalind Elsie Franklin (1920–1958), the brilliant British chemist whose X‑ray crystallography images led directly to the model of DNA’s double helix. Whilst Franklin began her scientific journey with a PhD in physical chemistry from Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1945, it was at King’s College London where her X‑ray […]
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