Tristram Hunt

Tristram Julian William Hunt (born 31 May 1974) is a British historian, broadcast journalist and former politician who has been Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum since 2017. He served as the Labour Member of Parliament (MP) for Stoke-on-Trent Central from 2010 to 2017, and Shadow Secretary of State for Education from 2013 to 2015.

He has written several books, presented history programmes on television, and was a regular writer for The Guardian and The Observer.

Hunt was born in Cambridge, the son of Julian Hunt, a meteorologist and leader of the Labour Party group on Cambridge City Council in 1972–73, who in 2000 was awarded a life peerage as Baron Hunt of Chesterton, and the grandson of Roland Hunt, a British diplomat. The Hunt family were goldsmiths and silversmiths in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; John Samuel Hunt (1785–1865) being in business with his uncle-by-marriage, Paul Storr; also descended from John Samuel Hunt was John Hunt, Baron Hunt of Fawley.

Hunt is the great-grandson of Maxwell Garnett, barrister and educationist, and great-great-grandson of William Garnett, an academic and professor in physics. As such he is a cousin of Virginia Bottomley, Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone, and of Peter Jay, former son-in-law of the late Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan. Through Bottomley, he is related by marriage to Sir Peter Bottomley and former Labour MP and economist Kitty Ussher.

Tristram Hunt was educated at University College School, an all-boys' private school in Hampstead, north London. There, he achieved two As (History and Latin) and a B (English Literature) at A-Level. He took a First in History at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1995.

He later attended the University of Chicago, and was for a time an Associate Fellow of the Centre for History and Economics at King's College, Cambridge. He undertook postgraduate study at the University of Cambridge and completed his Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree in 2000. His thesis, written under the supervision of Gareth Stedman Jones, was titled Civic Thought in Britain, c.1820–c.1860. While at Cambridge he was a member of the amateur theatrical club the Footlights, where he was a contemporary of David Mitchell and Robert Webb.

Hunt was a Fellow of the Institute for Public Policy Research and sits on the board of the New Local Government Network (2004). He has made many appearances on television, presenting programmes on the English Civil War (2002), the theories of Sir Isaac Newton (Great Britons, 2002), and the rise of the middle class, and makes regular appearances on BBC Radio 4, having presented broadcasts on such topics as the history of the signature. His first book was The English Civil War: At First Hand (2002).

His specialism is urban history, specifically during the Victorian era, and it is this subject which provided him with his second book, Building Jerusalem (2004). This book, covering such notable Victorian minds as John Ruskin, Joseph Chamberlain and Thomas Carlyle, received many favourable reviews but some criticism, notably a scathing review in The Times Literary Supplement by J. Mordaunt Crook.