This past Saturday (9th September) the Archives & Special Collections hosted an open day as part of the national Heritage Open Days events, offering a glimpse of just some of our diverse collections and a behind the scenes tour of our stores. Armed with bunting and balloons galore we had a great time decorating the outside of our building and signposting the way to our display!

Exhibits in the display included material from across our collections: the University’s institutional archive and that of its predecessor Battersea Polytechnic, archives from the National Resource Centre for Dance, the personal archive of E H Shepard, and the Thomas Farrer Collection, a Victorian gentleman’s library.

This year we took a more relaxed approach, allowing people to drop in at any time during the Saturday and offering a rolling programme of tours, which proved to be very popular – we had more than double the number of people visiting than last year’s bookable event! A lot of interest was shown in both the collections and the way we store and care for the material we have, with many people saying they had no idea we had so many wonderful things. The nicest comment we had was “Gosh, what a lovely place, it’s a credit to the University”, which certainly made all the hard work worthwhile!

Here are some images from the day…