Kenneth Hudson

Kenneth Hudson OBE, MA, FSA (4 July 1916 – 28 December 1999) was a journalist, anti-museologist, broadcaster and book author.

He was born in Harlesden and educated at the Lower School of John Lyon (now The John Lyon School) in Harrow and at University College London. In the Second World War he registered as a conscientious objector, serving in the Friends' Ambulance Unit. After the Second World War he worked in Germany in the Entnazifizierung campaign.

He became a lecturer in adult education at the University of Bristol in 1947, moving to the BBC in Bristol in 1954 as a radio talks producer and industrial correspondent. In 1966 he joined the staff of Bristol College of Science and Technology, which later became the University of Bath, to set up an educational television service.

As a journalist and museologist, he was a controversial character of the European museum scene and inventor of the term "industrial archaeology" in the 1960s, a broadcaster and the author of numerous books. In 1963 he wrote one of the first books on the subject, Industrial Archaeology: An Introduction, and in 1965 his Industrial Archaeology of Southern England. He was the first editor of the Journal of Industrial Archaeology in which, with others, he produced an annual review of the rapidly growing literature. In 1972 he published his book on Building Materials in the Longmans IA series, and in 1979 he co-wrote, with Julian Pettifer, Diamonds in the Sky, the result of historical research on the social history of air travel for the BBC television series of the same name.

The latter part of his career was largely devoted to work on the public level of museums, producing gazetteers such as the classic Cambridge Guide to Museums of Britain and Ireland (1987) on which he collaborated with Ann Nicholls.

Together with John Letts he founded the European Museum of the Year Award in 1977, later to become the European Museum Forum, aimed at stimulating the international interchange of ideas and creating networks of inspiration.

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