Freya Purcell is a design historian who focuses on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her work frequently examines everyday life and urban living, a fact which has been reflected in her research during her MA at the V&A/RCA, which has covered a broad range of subjects from Victorian Police Rattles to Irish Furniture. Her interest in design history stemmed originally from seeking to investigate histories of those less represented in textual sources. To do this Freya looks to employ a multidisciplinary approach weaving Design Histories with those of Sensory Experience, Emotion, Medicine or more; something she wishes to continue in her future research. What this future research will be is still to be decided, though the topic of ephemerality and memory is something she would like to explore further in some way. Whichever road her research leads her, she hopes to be a historian who reflects whose work is accessible and reflective of broader audiences.
Having previously worked at Leighton House Museum, Freya is keen to develop as a public historian; widening knowledge and interest in history and deconstructing popular myths. In response to the pandemic and events of 2020 she and two of her classmates, Genevieve Drinkwater and Tomas Brown founded the Word On The Street Archive; the UK’s first mapped archive collecting crowd-sourced photography created in the wake of COVID-19. She can currently be found squirrelled away as a cataloguer in an antique bookshop.
Image - Detail of Anonymous, Five Criers On a Single Sheet, c1780-1790, Woodcut, London Metropolitan Archives, p7513470.