The annual Jocelyn Herbert lecture: less is more

In memory of designer Jocelyn Herbert, the former director of the National Theatre gives the first annual lecture to celebrate the role of the theatre designer.

The Jocelyn Herbert Archive is housed at Wimbledon College of Art, fulfilling her wish that it be placed in an environment where it can be made available for the direct and active use by theatre and art students as well as by academic researchers. Jocelyn Herbert had a long connection with the theatre department at Wimbledon College of Art, and in 2000 received an honorary doctorate from the college.

In 2006 Wimbledon College of Art became part of the University of the Arts London, and the archive is now managed from within the CCW Graduate School, itself based across three UAL colleges - Camberwell College of Arts, Chelsea College of Art and Design and Wimbledon College of Art.

The Jocelyn Herbert Archive is unusually extensive, spanning the drawings and notes she made in her student years at the London Theatre Studio in the late 1930s to the notebook she was using the day she died in 2003, which she spent working with Tony Harrison on his new play. The Archive encompasses over 5000 drawings as well as related models, notebooks, sketchbooks, diaries, research material, mask moulds and masks, photographs, posters and scripts. In addition there is an important body of correspondence with directors, writers, actors, producers, agents and other theatre and film professionals as well as paperwork relating to The English Stage Company and to the building committee of the National Theatre.

The Rootstein Hopkins Foundation has generously funded the cataloguing of the collection and the digitisation of Jocelyn Herbert's images.

900 people were in the audience for this first annual Jocelyn Herbert lecture.