Tristram Hunt
Tristram Hunt
Tristram Hunt is Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He served as the Member of Parliament (Labour Party) for Stoke-on-Trent Central from 2010 to 2017.
Tristram was a Member of the Select Committee on Political and Constitutional Reform, Member of the Joint Committee on Reform of the House of Lords and Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Energy Intensive Industries. He was also co-Chair of the APPG on Rebalancing the British Economy and the APPG on Publishing.
He took a First Class degree in history from the University of Cambridge (1995), before serving as an Exchange Fellow at the University of Chicago (1996), and returning to Cambridge to complete his doctoral thesis on Victorian civic pride (2000). After working for Tony Blair and the Labour Party HQ on the 1997 General Election campaign, he became a Special Adviser to Science Minister Lord Sainsbury (1997-2000), Associate Fellow at the Centre for History and Economics, King’s College, Cambridge and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research.
Between 2001-2010, Tristram combined his post as lecturer in history at Queen Mary with work as a history broadcaster, presenting over fifteen radio and television programmes for the BBC and Channel 4. During this period, Tristram also served as a Trustee of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Heritage Lottery Fund, the New Local Government Network and the Centre for Cities think-tank. In addition to making regular contributions to the Guardian and the Observer, he is also the author of The English Civil War First Hand (2002), Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City (2004), the award-winning biography, The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life or Friedrich Engles (2009), Ten Cities that made an Empire (2014), and The Radical Potter Josiah Wedgwood and the Transformation of Britain (2021).
During his time in Parliament, Tristram focused on the regeneration needs of Stoke-on-Trent; the ceramics industry and energy intensive sector; educational excellence; constitutional reform; and the Labour Party policy review. He is a Trustee of the History of Parliament Trust, fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and Senior Lecturer in Modern British History at Queen Mary, University of London.
