Planned Environment Therapy Trust

Researcher Imogen Wiltshire, from the University of Birmingham, visited the Archive and Study Centre this week to look at the documents in our Q-Camps collection.   Currently working on her AHRC-supported MPhil in the University's History of Art Department, Imogen's research focuses on Arthur Segal's Painting School for Professionals and Non-professionals (1937-44) which was based in London and Oxford.  Specifically, she is interested in the idea of Segal as a pioneer of psychoanalytical and psychotherapeutic approaches to painting.    

Segal (1875-1944) was a Romanian-born, Berlin-based Jewish artist who left Germany in 1933, and after a brief period in Spain came to England where he founded his School in 1937.   Imogen - who has won an AHRC PhD Fellowship to continue her work  - is particularly interested in the therapeutic elements of the School, which was attended by members of the British Psychoanalytical Society, and also used to help traumatised soldiers returning home from the War after 1941.   

Her visit to the PETT Archive this week was to investigate further Segal's association with Hawkspur Camp for Men (1936-1940), the first of two therapeutic camps established by the Q-Camps Committee.  The camps, built by the men themselves, were an outgrowth of an organisation called Grith Fyrd, and devised carefully planned environments, using shared responsibility in the treatment of disturbed and delinquent young men; some of the men from Hawkspur Camp went on to attend the Painting School.  

The Q-Camps archives came to the Archive and Study Centre in 1989 as part of the David Wills Collection - having originally been sent to David Wills at Barns House in Scotland from London during World War II for their safe-keeping (the train they were on was bombed on the way; the archives were re-packaged by the salvage crews and sent on to Scotland).

Wiki-fact: Arthur Segal's son Walter was an architect, who created the Segal method of self-built housing. Coincidence? For more, click here.

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