Talking Records: Pollution in the Archive (in person)

‘Talking Records’ is a new annual collections-based symposium held at The National Archives. The theme for 2025 is ‘Pollution in the Archive’.

Across different times and places, from local to global, the concept of pollution is intertwined with histories of land use and management, agricultural practices, public health and more. All aspects of the environment are vulnerable to the effects of harmful substances, including pesticides, industrial waste, and radioactive material. Human and non-human creatures can be vulnerable when environments, habitats, and ecosystems are contaminated.

In our records, pollution histories intersect with industrial histories (e.g. coal mining, industrial accidents, military activity) and urgent contemporary questions about energy sources and climate change. Pollution is an ever-evolving concept, and even pre-modern records can speak to us about changing scientific, social, and cultural understandings of contamination across the centuries.

Programme

Registration at 9:00-9:30

Panel 1 - Land: Agriculture, Mining, and Waste Management

• Pollution in Late Medieval Cambridgeshire, Louis Henry

• Pollution in life stories of twentieth century British science and agriculture, Paul Merchant and Sally Horrocks

• Bauxite Mining and Ghana’s Akosombo Dam, Heather Craddock

Panel 2 - Air

• Knitting the Air: Participatory textiles as archives of contemporary air quality, Caroline Murray

• Kew Gardens’ historical response to environmental pollution – a starting point, Isabel Lauterjung

• Searching for Smog: Lived Experiences of Air Pollution in Newspaper Archives and Oral History Collections, Kathy Davies

• “Smoke is the Enemy”: Public Health, Policy and the Lived Experience of the Great Smog of London, Laura Robson-Mainwaring

Lunch - Screening of ‘The Contract: Imperial Legacies of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) Pipeline’, Christina Danielle Bartson

Panel 3 - Water

• Matter Out of Place: Governing Fouled Waterways in Early Modern England, Hannah Worthen and Briony McDonagh

• Digital humanities, data, and pollution: experiments from the Congruence Engine project, Max Long

• Experiences of Toxic Pollution and Knowledge Justice in the North American Great Lakes, 1970s-1990s, Maud Rijks

• ‘They whose property happens to lie on the stream, even many miles below the towns, are sufferers in a variety of ways’: water pollution as a vector of modernity in England and Wales, 1848-1875, Chris Day

Panel 4 - Pollutants: Pesticides, Plastic, and Polluted Records

• Colonial Chemical Prophylactics: The Corruption of Traditional Ecological Epistemologies in Zambia, Maria Dragoi

• Anatomic Archives: Poetry, Pollution, and Plastic, Tatun Harrison-Turnbull

• Polluted Waters: The Archival Agency of the Yorkshire Rivers Foss and Ouse, Fran Mahon

• Handle with Care, Elizabeth Haines, Lucy Razzall and Lora Angelova

This event will be in-person only. A separate online-only session is taking place on Friday 5 December. Register to attend the online session.

Vegetarian and vegan lunch and refreshments will be available.

We encourage attendees to travel to the event by public transport. Details of how to find us.

If you have any accessibility requirements you would like to discuss or any questions, please email research@nationalarchives.gov.uk.

Registration will close on Sunday 30 November.

Read more about Talking Records: Pollution in the Archive on our website.