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Umilio, ул Мира, Kyiv (2026)

19/03/2023

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART
NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART. In December 1936, Andrew W. Mellon offered to build an art gallery for the United States in Washington, D.C., and to donate his superb art collection to the nation as the nucleus of its holdings. President Franklin D. Roosevelt recommended acceptance of this gift, described as the largest to the national government up to that time. On 24 March 1937, the Seventy-fifth Congress approved a joint resolution to establish the National Gallery of Art as an independent bureau of the Smithsonian Institution.

The Genesis Of The National Gallery Of Art
Andrew W. Mellon (1855–1937), one of America's most successful financiers, came to Washington in 1921 as secretary of the treasury, a position he held until 1932. While in Washington, he came to believe that the United States capital needed a great art museum to serve Americans and visitors from abroad. He had begun to collect paintings early in life, yet he made his most important purchases after his plans for the national art gallery began to take shape. Most notably, in 1930 and 1931 Mellon purchased twenty-one paintings from the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad, USSR. He paid a total of more than $6.6 million for the works, including The Annunciation by Jan van Eyck, The Alba Madonna by Raphael, and A Polish Nobleman by Rembrandt. In 1930, he formed the A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust to hold works of art and funds to build the new museum.

The institution that Mellon envisioned was to blend private generosity with public ownership and support. He laid out his proposals in two letters of 22 December 1936 and 31 December 1936 to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. These letters became the basis for the museum's enabling legislation. Mellon believed the museum should belong to the people of the United States and that the entire public "should forever have access" to it. To accomplish this, it should be open to the public without charge and maintained by annual Congressional appropriation. At the same time, however, Mellon believed the museum, which would be built with private funds, should grow through gifts of works of art from private citizens. To encourage such gifts, Mellon stipulated that the museum not bear his name but be called "the national gallery of art or such other name as would identify it as a gallery of art of the National Government." To ensure its excellence, he also stipulated that all works of art in the museum be of the same high standard of quality as his own extraordinary collection.

Reflecting the combined public and private character of the museum, its enabling legislation specifies that the National Gallery of Art will be governed by a board of nine trustees consisting of four public officials: the Chief Justice of the United States, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, and the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, and five private citizens.

Mellon selected architect John Russell Pope (1874– 1937), one of the best known architects of his generation, to design the museum's original West Building. The building Pope planned is classic in style, but thoroughly modern in its proportions and structure.

The location of the museum was of particular concern to Mellon. He believed that it should be close to other museums and accessible for visitors. After considering various alternatives, he selected a site on the north side of the national Mall, close to the foot of Capitol Hill near the intersection of Constitution and Pennsylvania Avenues. Construction of the West Building began in June 1937. In August 1937, less than three months later, Andrew W. Mellon died. John Russell Pope died less than twenty-four hours later. The building was completed by Pope's associates, architects Otto Eggers and Daniel P. Higgins, under the direction of the A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust.

Dedication
On the evening of 17 March 1941, the National Gallery of Art was dedicated before a gathering of roughly nine thousand invited guests. Andrew Mellon's son Paul presented the gift of the museum and the Mellon Collection to the nation on behalf of his father. In accepting the gift for the people of the United States, President Franklin D. Roosevelt concluded the ceremonies: "The dedication of this Gallery to a living past and to a greater and more richly living future, is the measure of the earnestness of our intention that the freedom of the human spirit shall go on."

In keeping with Andrew Mellon's vision for the National Gallery of Art, by the time of the museum's dedication, its collections were already being augmented by gifts from other donors. In July 1939, Samuel H. Kress (1863–1955), founder of the chain of five and dime stores, had offered the museum his large collection of mostly Italian Renaissance art. The great Widener Collection, including paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer, El Greco, Degas, and others, also had been promised. Nonetheless, vast possibilities remained for further expansion.

The War Years
The museum opened on the eve of World War II. Less than ten months after its dedication, on 1 January 1942, the Gallery's most important works of art were moved for safekeeping to Biltmore House in Asheville, North Carolina. The museum remained open throughout the war and made every effort to make its rooms welcoming to men and women of the armed services. Following the example of the National Gallery in London, the museum began a series of Sunday afternoon concerts to entertain and inspire visitors. The concerts proved so successful that they were extended throughout the war and continue to the present.

The National Gallery of Art was instrumental in the establishment and work of the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas (the Roberts Commission). At the request of a number of organizations and individuals in the American cultural and intellectual community, on 8 December 1942 Chief Justice of the United States Harlan Stone, then Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the National Gallery of Art, wrote President Roosevelt to ask him to set up a commission to help in protecting historic buildings and monuments, works of art, libraries, and archives in war areas. The Commission was formed as a result of this request. Its headquarters was in the National Gallery building.

In December 1945, shortly after the close of hostilities, the United States Army asked the National Gallery to accept temporary custody of 202 paintings from Berlin museums until conditions permitted their return to Germany.

The move proved highly controversial. Nonetheless, the works remained in secure storage at the museum until March 1948 when they were placed on public display for 40 days. Nearly a million people viewed the works during this brief period. Following the exhibition, paintings on panel were transferred to Germany and the remaining works toured to twelve other museums in the United States before being returned.

The Collections
During the war and afterward, the collections of the National Gallery of Art continued to grow. In 1943, Lessing J. Rosenwald (1891–1979) gave his collection of old master and modern prints and drawings. He continued to enlarge and enhance the collection until his death in 1979, when his gifts to the Gallery totaled some 22,000 prints and drawings. In 1943, Chester Dale (1883–1962), who eventually assembled one of the greatest collections of French impressionist and post-impressionist paintings, gave his first gift to the museum. When Dale died in 1962, he left the Gallery a bequest that included 252 masterworks of painting and sculpture.

Andrew Mellon's own children, Ailsa Mellon Bruce (1901–1969) and Paul Mellon (1907–1999) became the museum's most important supporters and benefactors. Throughout her life, Ailsa gave the museum works of art and funds that were used for the purchase of such masterpieces as Leonardo da Vinci's Ginevra de'Benci. Her brother Paul served as a trustee for more than 40 years before retiring in 1985. Paul Mellon also was an important collector, especially of British and French impressionist works. By the time of his death, he had given more than 1,000 works of art and generous endowments to the museum his father founded.

The East Building
By the time of its twenty-fifth anniversary in 1966, the National Gallery of Art had outgrown the original West Building. Additional space was needed for the display of the permanent collection, including large modern paintings and sculpture; for temporary exhibitions; and for new library and research facilities. Realizing these needs, in 1967 Paul Mellon and Ailsa Mellon Bruce offered funds for a second museum building. Architect Ieoh Ming Pei (1917–) was selected to design the new building, which was to be built on the trapezoidal site immediately to the east of the original building. The site had been set aside for the museum in its enabling legislation. Pei designed a dramatic modernist building, whose public spaces are centered around a grand atrium enclosed by a sculptural space frame. The ground breaking took place in 1971, and the East Building was dedicated and opened to the public in 1978.

16/03/2023

Sorry Sudoku fans, you’re about to be beat by anyone with a smart phone. In their latest deviation from the ‘don’t be evil’ motto, Google has taught the Google Goggles application how to solve Sudoku puzzles. Cheating has never been so easy. GG, which allows its users to search the world visually, can take pictures using your smart phone camera (Android or iOS 4.0), identify what you’re looking at, and point you to the relevant information online. The most recent version of the application has faster bar code reading speeds, identifies print ads in magazines, and can put any Sudoku champion to shame. We’ve got some great videos for you below highlighting each of the new features on Android devices, plus a video I shot myself to prove it all works on iPhone. I’ve got to tell you, being able to snap a pic of a puzzle and have it solved in seconds is pretty damn awesome… but the other two features are probably going to make a bigger impact.

No matter how good you may be at solving Sudoku puzzles, the internet is better. There are tons of sites that will help you solve an especially tricky setup, but Google Goggles does it one step quicker. All you need to do is take a picture of the puzzle and Google will send you to the solution in just two clicks. Easy as pie, and more than fast enough to defeat the most determined Sudoku enthusiast. Check out the demo video below. This sort of feels like bringing a tank to a soccer match.

There are tons of apps out there that will read barcodes. Google claims to do this faster and better. In the Android version of Goggles, the camera will automatically locate a barcode without you having to actually take a picture. In the iPhone version, you have to push the camera icon. Either way, the results are quick and easy. Google didn’t expressly publish a new video for the barcode speed improvement, but this look at Google Shopper gives you an idea of what the barcode scanning is like.

Last but not least, Google Goggles will identify print ads in major publications. Essentially, Google now has a catalog of ads it can visually search for you. According to their blog, “this new feature of Goggles is enabled for print ads appearing in major U.S. magazines and newspapers from August 2010 onwards.” In my own experimentation I had trouble finding an ad that would be recognized. Then again, the only magazines I had on hand were weird art industry publications (don’t ask). I’m guessing the range of ads will increase in the years ahead.

The ad search project was based on an early experiment in offline marketing that Google released this fall. Google says, “We’re now recognizing a much broader range of ads than we initially included in our marketing experiment. And when we recognize a print ad, we return web search results. While in the experiment, we return a specific link to an external website.” Here’s a video of the original project:

You’ll notice that all of these videos use Android phones. As a (proud) owner of an iPhone 3Gs, I’d wanted to make sure that Google Goggles would work for me as well. I shouldn’t have been concerned. Embedded in the iOS Google App, Goggles passed my little test with flying colors.

We’ve seen many of these capabilities before, especially in some of the Layar apps. Yet Google is putting all of these visual search applications in one place, and making it very easy to use. Google Goggles didn’t originate barcode scans, print ad identifications, or Sudoku solving, but they did a pretty great job conquering those fields.

As much fun as I’m going to have racing my unsuspecting friends in impromptu Sudoku competitions, there’s little doubt that the bigger news here is the barcode and print ad applications. People shop online a lot. I mean tons. People are also impulsive and will buy things on a whim. Perhaps you see where I’m going with this. Online vendors have been introducing sales apps for smart phones over the past few years. With Google Goggles (and Google Shopper) you now have a means to easily translate ads you see into purchases. The same goes for barcodes (or book covers, or CD cases, or any of the other things GG recognizes). Although Google Goggles doesn’t yet allow you to take a picture of your friend’s shoes and order them online, we’re getting closer to that ability. Universal point and shoot shopping is very near.

14/03/2023

Mel Giedroyc is just finishing a photoshoot in a studio in south-west London, and rushes up to greet me, apologising that she has to get changed before we talk, because she’s in ridiculous clothes. So she goes off in an I [heart] New York T-shirt, and then comes back in her own clothes: dungarees.

She has always given an impression of a rare lack of vanity, a person who sees her appearance as just another tool in her clowning toolbox, like juggling balls. And that’s partly true, she says, but only up to a point. “Sue [Perkins, her long-term comic partner] and I have always said, when it comes to it, we’ll do what needs to be done.” We’re talking about Botox, fillers, that kind of stuff. “I’m 54, she’s 52, she’s weirdly perfect. I keep saying: ‘Have you gone behind my back?’ We’ve always said to each other: if we do it, we’ll do it together. And we’ll go to Armenia slash Latvia.’”

I suggest that they could sell it as a format: Mel and Sue go to Latvia and come back with new teeth and different faces. “Maybe we should swap faces, to confuse people?” she suggests. But back to the point. “I keep thinking: ‘If she goes and does anything without telling me, I’m going to be so cross with her.’” It’s as if she’s sending a comedy-mafia signal through the pages of the Guardian: together, or not at all, at least in so far as minor aesthetic treatments are concerned.

We are not here to talk about the almost 35-year-old comedy dyad at all, but Unforgivable, the chaotic panel show on Dave which is just about to enter its third season. On it, Giedroyc is paired with Lou Sanders (“Twenty years younger. Actually I don’t know how old she is, she told me once but I’m a bit deaf”), and they invite a panel of three comedians to disclose the worst things they’ve ever done. Then some regular people come on and admit random bad acts.

It is heavily scatological, the links are clunky and the puns are laboured so hard they should unionise. The new season is so funny I was at one point shouting with laughter at a story told by the comedian Joel Dommett, which involved his mattress, his bed base and his p***s, and which even he looked quite surprised to be telling.

Sue Perkins and Mel Giedroyc, on The Great British Bake Off in 2013.
‘Who wants to look at cakes?’ … Giedroyc with Sue Perkins on The Great British Bake Off in 2013.
Photograph: Des Willie/BBC/Love Productions
“Often, somebody will spill something that we didn’t know they were going to spill,” she says. “But Joel … he does The Masked Singer, he’s really Mr ITV, Saturday night. He’s not Mr One-in-the-Morning.” That’s sort of Unforgivable’s USP: it takes nice, mainstream, even daytime TV people and turns them into Mr or Mrs-One-in-the-Morning. “When you have three people, they start to get competitive with each other,” she says, “and that’s when it gets really fun. Especially with comics. They don’t want to be outdone.

“Unforgivable is a naughty show,” Giedroyc concludes. “It’s just a massive midlife crisis, basically me saying: ‘I want to go back to when I felt my naughtiest, which was in the 90s. I want to be 25 again, or 23.’”

In fact, I remember that. Although I didn’t know her in the naughty years, I did grunt work a few years in a row at the Edinburgh venue where she and Perkins perfected their standup routine. They had met in 1988, both at Cambridge, doing Footlights, but by this time they’d left “with really weak degrees. Really weak. Low 2:2. Sue as well; people assume she must have got a first but she didn’t. And we weren’t trained to do anything. What do you do with a French and Italian degree?”

Mel “didn’t have the nous to go to clown school” (although clowning about was her passion) and had tried and failed to get into drama school, a combination of not preparing properly for the audition and not being pretty enough. She says this quite obliquely, recalling a day at Bristol Old Vic, when “all the other girls had sort of long corkscrew curls, like Helena Bonham Carter. And that’s something that’s really changed.”

I went round to Perks’s gaff and said: I can’t do this any more. We’ve borrowed from our siblings, our agent lent us a grand
Finally, high on failure and aimlessness, she wrote to Perkins, who she usually calls “Perks”, a letter Perkins still has. “Basically saying: ‘Dear Susan, would you like to form a double act?’ So that’s what we did for seven years.” She describes their shtick as totally shambolic, on-the-hoof material that they were practically still writing as they performed it, often to an audience of one. It didn’t look like that from the outside; they seemed almost unique for being able to pull in a crowd and had an air of seriousness about them, like they might actually make a living from this. They were the kind of people that other performers pointed out, like: “There’s Mel and Sue – Mel smiled at me the other day.”

She puts any success down to luck, chance and a journalist “who wanted to do a piece about a really, really struggling double act at the fringe. Then suddenly, we had sellout shows because all these Times readers showed up.”

Mel and Sue, when presenters of the ITV series Casting Couch in 1999.
Mel and Sue, when presenters of the ITV series Casting Couch in 1999. Photograph: ITV/Shutterstock
Underneath this haze of self-deprecation, there is a through line of an absolutely solid determination to be up there on stage, showing off. When she was a kid, growing up in Leatherhead with a Polish father and English mother (her dad was an engineer and, for his second act, a Latvian medievalist), her pattern was that she’d try for the school play, not get a part, “and I’d say: ‘Maybe I could write a little prologue?’ And I’d write something really long, and end up with quite a big part. Such a showoff.”

Such grit, which Perkins reputedly also has in spades, didn’t exactly put them on a fast track. By 1997, after years of standup, making money by cleaning, working in the bar in Jongleurs (at the time, an incredibly original and vibey comedy club), Giedroyc was defeated. “I remember it so clearly, going round to Perks’s gaff, sitting down on the bed and just saying: ‘I can’t do this any more. I’ve got no money. You’re the same. We’re in debt, we’ve borrowed from our siblings, our agent had to lend us a grand.’ I was desperate.”

This was when the call came through for Light Lunch, a fizzingly daft Channel 4 daytime show, full of random interviews and sandwich reviews and, in a harbinger of things to come, cake, which they initially rejected out of hand. “We were, like: ‘Sorry, excuse me, a daytime show? We are cutting-edge Edinburgh comedians.’” It is pretty extraordinary to think of it now, that a major broadcaster would give a daily hour of TV to two unknown comics, and Channel 4 thought so, too, initially putting them on a rolling two-week contract. But the show soon had a committed following, and not in that feckless, post-ironic stoner way that shows like Neighbours and Teletubbies did. “It was students, breastfeeding mums and prisoners. I was getting a lot of letters from Gwent remand centre.”

It is hard to get to the true centre of Mel and Sue, as a partnership. There’s definitely something about them, when they come together, that is more than the sum of their parts: energy, sure, but also notes of surrealism and unpredictability. But this career-long lockstep hasn’t had the effect of making them rivalrous or resentful, Giedroyc says. “You have to do things, especially as you get older, separately. Otherwise it gets, I imagine, incredibly claustrophobic. I don’t know how Ant and Dec do it. Full respect, they’re amazing.”

And again, things were different when they were starting out. If acting was sexist in the sense that only beautiful women could do it, comedy was worse: it was really not unusual to read 1,000 words of a man asking: “Why aren’t women funny?” When female comedians were invited on panel shows, they were treated with a kind of benign but quietly exasperated condescension, like your mate had had to bring his wife to a boys’ night in the pub, because there was a mouse in the house.

Perks and I always had that safe haven with each other, which I think got us through
“Perks and I always had that safe haven with each other, which I think got us through,” Giedroyc says, “and I think French and Saunders would say the same thing. It doesn’t matter what arseholes are saying outside your haven, because you’ve got each other. But I remember doing torturous things in the 90s like Never Mind the Buzzcocks, as it was then [now one of the captains is Daisy May Cooper], and coming away feeling shattered. Just thinking that was one of the worst things I’ve ever had to go through.” Giedroyc is particularly proud of one episode in this Unforgivable season in which all five participants are women, “all of them hilarious, and I didn’t even plan it. It almost made me cry.” I wonder if that’s the first time that’s happened on TV?

One of the double act hiatuses was when Giedroyc had children – two daughters, born in 2002 and 2004, with the director Ben Morris. Apart from the joy of motherhood and all that, this was mainly impactful for almost bankrupting the family and they lost their house, a riches-to-rags experience she drew on for her first novel, The Best Things, published last year. When the chance to present Bake Off heaved into view in 2010, she was still skint and did it mainly for the money, and the chance to work with Perks again. They did not immediately fall in love with the idea. “Cake is so backward-looking, isn’t it?” she says, speculatively. I know what she means. Bake Off has always had a remain heart and a leave aesthetic.

Filming the first season didn’t exactly allay their reservations, although they did love Mary Berry from the start. “I remember phoning Perks saying: ‘Don’t worry, mate – no one’s ever going to see this.’ Because we were really scared. We were thinking: ‘Well, that’s the end of our careers. That was the flattest, tweest, most boring thing we’ve ever done. Who wants to look at cakes?’” If you’re thinking this sounds unusually frank for showbiz, it’s probably because the pair left the show a bit before they would have chosen, under not as great circumstances as they would have wished. Obviously, it went really well for a bit. “It was just mad. No one could have predicted that it would explode in that way – we certainly couldn’t have. What a joy to have that mad thing happen to you in your 40s. It just doesn’t happen to two old birds.”

Mel Giedroyc (with a fake cigarette).
‘I didn’t have the nous to go to clown school’ … Giedroyc with a fake cigarette.
Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian
After seven series, they got wind of something afoot but didn’t know until it was publicly announced that the production company, Love Productions, had sold the show to Channel 4. “I was getting messages from the head of C4 saying: ‘We hope that you’ll be on board.’ I think it took us under 20 seconds to work out that we weren’t going to go with it. We felt that the show had been nurtured by the BBC. And effectively, the makers of the show were just going ‘See ya’, and going for the money. And that didn’t sit well with us.” They never thought it was going to crash and burn without them, since they were only ever “bookends”. In the end, there would always be more bakers, other cakes.

Giedroyc would like one more throw of the dice doing a standup show with Perkins, but has questions over whether they’d ever sit down and write it. She is writing a novel, adjacent to her first, with a couple of recurring characters, which she hopes to eventually turn into a Leatherhead trilogy. She enjoys not being a “bright young thing” any more, saying “it’s actually quite a relief when people aren’t that interested”. She mildly fears getting cancelled, but not in a Laurence Fox/GB News “you can’t say anything any more” way, more by her children. “I’m walking on eggshells, honestly.” (Hard relate. My kid called me racist the other day when I said I preferred boxers to spaniels.) She is as she started out, all drive and no plan, the way I think maybe comedians have to be, if they want to be funny.

14/03/2023

Standup comedian Tim Renkow’s blacker-than-black comedy Jerk is upping its game for its third series. The sitcom, about a man called Tim who has cerebral palsy and is a self-described terrible person, deserves a bigger audience. It has been given more episodes, moving from four guest stars per series to six – in the form of Sally Phillips, James Norton and Big Zuu, which should help it to gain the recognition it deserves.

Renkow, who co-writes with Shaun Pye (There She Goes, The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret) has come up with the sort of comedy that wants you to laugh and dares you to laugh, at the same time. This is a show that began, in 2019, with the fictional Tim pretending to wet himself in a cafe to embarrass a fellow customer for using the disabled toilet. This turned out to be a relatively gentle start. The first series saw Tim testing whether, as a disabled employee, he was “unsackable”, what happens when you pose as an asylum-seeker for free food, and the surprise discovery of N**i relatives. The second kept it breezy with methadone, going to the gym and organised religion.

The third reaches for the darkness and the light. It has found an appetite for the casting debate, and sinks its teeth in. An up-for-it James Norton plays himself, cast as a disabled French jazz drummer in an Oscar-bait film called Unbeaten. The casting of Norton angers activists, who stage an on-set protest, while Tim – always on the lookout for what benefits himself or upsets other people – decides to appear as an extra. This mess of bad PR, poor image management, do-gooders, superficial allyship and woeful ignorance ends up in a tangle of spectacularly silly slapstick. Later, Tim gets roped into politics, policy and an alternative career as a drug mule, a job for which he turns out to be particularly well chosen, though not for the reasons he initially thinks.

But, perhaps the bigger surprise is that, for all its sharp fangs, it has opened up its heart, too. The friendship between Tim, his carer Ruth (Sharon Rooney) and his former employment officer Idris (Rob J Madin) has always been briskly sweet – though, in the world of Jerk, “sweet” usually just means marginally less brutal than other social interactions – and it remains the framework on which the rest of the story hangs. They each have a cross to bear – Idris semi-accidentally starts running a Black bookshop, while Ruth corrupts a guide dog – but as a trio they shine. Tim’s mother (a brash, brilliant Lorraine Bracco) still mostly appears by video call, but steals almost every scene she’s in. “As the world’s leading internet expert on cerebral palsy, I can tell you categorically that being a p***y is not a symptom,” she told her son in the first ever episode, making it clear where his personality comes from.

Bracco has more reason to appear in person this time around, as Tim is getting married. Cleverly, the question of “who to?” is kept open for a while. One might be forgiven for, briefly, wondering why; there was a moment when his mother suggested getting married for a visa. As it gradually becomes clear what’s going on, it turns into a love story, though the show is so allergic to romance that it practically runs screaming from it every time it gets close. Even so, the idea is intriguing. Ramping up the discomfort of a man who revels in the discomfort of others, by exposing his potential for sentimentality and even selflessness, leads to some next-level awkwardnes

14/03/2023

During Melanie Sutton’s first term studying photography at the University of Portsmouth, it hit her that she wasn’t like the other students. “Around Christmas time, people started talking about going home, and earlier they’d been mentioning getting financial support from their families, and things like that. It became very apparent we were not in the same boat,” the 22-year-old says.

Sutton has been estranged from her family since she was 16 and almost didn’t go to university after struggling with her mental health at college. But when the Covid-19 pandemic wiped out her work as a dog walker, she decided to see how far she could take her love of photography. University has been something of a transition, she admits, but she’s been impressed by the level of support that’s been available to her.

“When I spoke to the finance department, they were so helpful,” she says. “At the end of the first year, I was struggling to pay a deposit for a house rental and they helped me set up a payback plan for the entire year. They’ve also connected me with people to talk to about my wellbeing, and there are housing and scholarship programmes.”

Estranged students are young people studying without the support and approval of a family network. According to the latest government statistics, there were almost 10,000 at English universities in the 2021/22 academic year. The reasons young people become estranged can vary. Research by the University of Cambridge found that emotional abuse is a key cause, and clashes of values and beliefs, or rejection of LGBTQ+ and transgender students, are common.

A 2015 study by Stand Alone, a charity that provides support to those estranged from their parents, found this group often felt unacknowledged and invisible while at university. Just over a quarter of participants (28%) said they did not feel comfortable accessing support, and 41% had considered withdrawing from their course due to money pressures, stress and/or mental health challenges.

The University of Portsmouth, which has 145 estranged students, was one of the first to sign the Stand Alone pledge in 2017. This asks institutions to provide support across four key impact areas – finance, accommodation, mental health and wellbeing, and outreach and transition. At Portsmouth, there’s a £1,000 bursary, guaranteed university accommodation all year round (meaning estranged students don’t have to move out in the holidays), a dedicated adviser for estranged students to contact throughout their studies, the Estranged Students Society, and bespoke social events at Christmas. There’s also help for covering graduation costs, and welcome packs with toiletries and bedding. In November 2022, the university won a Stand Alone pledge award for “best practice and innovation in support for mental health and wellbeing aimed at estranged students”.

Lucy Sharp by Conor Cleary University of Portsmouth
Lucy Sharp, director of the department for curriculum and quality enhancement. Photograph: Connor Cleary/University of Portsmouth
Lucy Sharp, director of the department for curriculum and quality enhancement, who leads on student wellbeing for the university, says the feedback from students has been very positive. “We hear all the time that the support from the Stand Alone team is outstanding, whether it’s to do with financial or emotional support. One of the things they do is send Christmas cards and arrange social events, which some estranged students say helps them feel cared for and appreciated during what can be a lonely time.”

There’s also growing concern for the mental health and wellbeing of students as a whole, due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and cost of living crisis. A poll of more than 12,200 students found that 81% were affected by mental health difficulties in 2022, compared with 60% in 2021. According to the Sutton Trust, which champions social mobility, one in four students are at risk of dropping out due to cost of living pressures, and others admit to skipping meals, cutting down on socialising and using less electricity or gas.

Sharp says wellbeing and learning go hand in hand – if one isn’t good it can impact on the other. “The effect of the pandemic on students has been far-reaching in terms of a disrupted education, limited opportunity to socialise and, of course, through loss and bereavement. Financial worries are a real concern, which is why our student finance team is a crucial cog in supporting all students, especially estranged students and those who have experienced the care system.”

At Portsmouth, welcome ambassadors are assigned groups of 15 new students, and they all meet online before term starts, helping to make the initial process of settling in easier.

Students sitting on the beach
Why we love our uni by the sea: two students on great tuition, fab facilities and chilling on the beach
Paid for by University of Portsmouth
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More widely, there’s academic and pastoral support from personal tutors; specialist mental health and counselling support in the wellbeing team; financial support; and a disability team that helps students ask for reasonable adjustments. Plus there’s out-of-hours wellbeing support, and the WhatsUp app, which helps students reflect on their feelings and reach out for advice anonymously when they need to.

“Students come to university to study, but they’re also coming to live independently, and grow as young adults and individuals,” Sharp says. “They’ll have some struggles from time to time and they need to be able to access support to help them flourish and thrive. That support is available here, it’s free and it’s confidential.”

Sutton would urge all universities to think about putting bespoke provision in place for students who are estranged from their families, but to do so in collaboration with them directly. “There is no right way to support estranged students and there can be a lot of stigma. Get feedback, ask students what they need, think about finance and housing alongside mental health wellbeing. There’s definitely an increasing demand. I truly believe there’s at least one estranged student in every university. You don’t ever truly know someone’s story unless they tell you about it.”

Umilio

19/03/2023

16/03/2023

14/03/2023

14/03/2023

14/03/2023

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