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The School of Geography archives are held in the Archive Room within the Edwards Resource Centre, and include material from across the hundred years of geography at the º£½ÇºÚÁÏ, with the oldest items the 1923 minute books of the student Geographical Society. A gallery of sample items from the archives is shown below.

The Geography Archives reflect in part the work of former head of department John Cole, who in the 1990s gathered historic pre-1970s material into a collection covering Geography’s place in the university, the Geographical Society’s minute books and magazines, field course itineraries since the 1920s, student lecture and fieldwork notebooks, departmental publications, and building plans for Geography’s new home in Clive Granger in 1967. Cole’s material was later supplemented by teaching and research records from the collection of former head of department RH Osborne. Cole also placed in the archive records of his own pioneering work in quantitative geography, including documents from attendance at an influential Ohio State University summer school in 1965. The archive gives a vivid sense of the teaching and research life of geographers at Nottingham over a hundred years.

On display in the Edwards Resource Centre is a centenary exhibition, set up in 2023, on the first ten years of the student Geographical Society, based on minute books and other sources, showing what it was to be a geography student in the 1920s and 1930s. Displays convey the organisation of the Society, and its intellectual, social and sporting activities, from debates to field trips to tennis tournaments to tea dances. Current students view this exhibition and compare their own twenty-first century student lives. Temporary exhibitions elsewhere in the School also offer thematic displays from the archives and map collection.

The Geography Archives include an extensive slide collection, elements of which have been digitised with the help of the university’s Manuscripts and Special Collections department. There are well over a thousand slides, some produced for teaching but others the product of research trips by staff. Collections include extensive coverage of Nottingham and the East Midlands, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, showing a region in transformation, with urban and infrastructural renewal accompanying industrial decline. There is also a notable collection on central and eastern Europe in the post-war decades, including slides recording RH Osborne’s travels in the eastern bloc, in Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Albania. The slide collections also include the teaching slides of Stephen Daniels, who from the 1980s played a key role in the development of cultural geography, for which Nottingham remains a key international centre.

The Geography Archives also hold a diverse range of objects relating to teaching and research, including historic surveying equipment, a card index of bibliographic material compiled by geomorphologist and quantitative geographer Cuchlaine King, and a 1940s University College Nottingham blazer donated by former student Gwynneth Enoch. There is also a collection of specialist publications and research materials relating to eastern Europe and the former USSR, reflecting the research careers of John Cole, RH Osborne and Adam Swain. The Nottingham connection to eastern Europe is sustained through the Osborne Research Fellowship, funded by a bequest from RH Osborne, which supports scholars from Bulgaria, Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia to conduct original research at Nottingham.

The curator of the Archives is Elaine Watts, to whom questions concerning access to the collections can be directed at: elaine.watts@nottingham.ac.uk