Pollution in the Archive

‘Talking records: Pollution in the Archive’

‘Talking Records’ is a new annual symposium held at The National Archives. Taking place at the end of the year, the symposium builds on an annual cycle of internal research events around a chosen topic, which in 2025 was pollution.

This event was open to all and free to attend; a call for papers was shared in the summer to encourage contributions from around the world. Following a high volume of strong submissions, the final programme was designed to address four themes: land, air, water and pollutants. To improve the in-person experience each panel was accompanied by a display of relevant documents.

Land

The first discussion panel on ‘Land’ started a conversation around the language of pollution. To start, we considered the changing terminology we use to describe ‘matter out of place’, a term coined by anthropologist Mary Douglas. It means something is seen as ‘out of place’ not because of what it is, but because of how people relate it to their understanding of correct order.

Louis Henry then discussed their research into late medieval social and legal understandings of pollution in Cambridgeshire and how it was responded to, both officially and unofficially. Next, Paul Merchant and Sally Horrocks showed how pollution appears in a large collection of 20th century oral history interviews with environmental scientists, farmers and others archived at the British Library.

Heather Craddock gave the last presentation in this panel. She shared research into records at The National Archives on bauxite mining, Ghana’s Akosombo Dam, and the varied forms of pollution that can result from large hydropower projects.

Volta River Project record.

Report on the Effects of the Project on the Riparian Communities Down-Steam from the Dam.

Air

The second panel explored air pollution. Caroline Murray talked about and displayed items from her collaborative project Knitting the Air. This visualises air quality data through knitting which she describes as ‘something soft saying something scientific’. Isabel Lauterjung then discussed the opportunities for research in this area at the Royal Botanic Garden’s archive in Kew. This included records describing the impact of smog and factories in Brentford on the health of plants in the gardens.

Next, Kathy Davies shared her research on the wide range of regional-specific terms to describe smog using the British Library’s newspaper archives. Laura Robson-Mainwaring concluded the panel with an overview of records at The National Archives on government action and personal stories of the Great Smog of London. How we can uncover the emotional impact of air pollution in archives was a continuing theme throughout panel discussions. Finding ways to reflect the experiences of the people affected by this was also considered.

Before moving to the afternoon sessions, Christina Bartson hosted a screening of The Contract. This is a documentary in-the-making that centres on the signing of the contract for the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) Pipeline. She also shared her thoughts on the process of accessing the BT Archives.

Water

Moving on to water pollution, Hannah Worthen returned to the idea of ‘matter out of place’ to discuss early modern pollution around the River Humber, using local Commissioner of Sewers records. After, Max Long discussed the Congruence Engine project at the Science Museum, which has now concluded. Max also discussed the methods they are using to address the complexities of Large Language Models in pollution research focusing on industrialising Bradford in the nineteenth century.

Maud Rijks then shared a range of archives on Greenpeace’s ‘toxic tour’ of the North American Great Lakes and ‘science as activism’. Christopher Day ended the panel with a talk on the 19th century reports of the Rivers Pollution Commission held at The National Archives. This talk explored debates over public health and how law courts broke down local jurisdictional boundaries based on the flow of rivers. The session looked at the value of archives in engaging local communities with regional pollution. Additionally, it addressed how the legal protections in place to defend rivers from pollution relate to wider conversations about the rights of nature.

Pollutants

The final session brought together two key forms of pollution – pesticides and plastics. This included papers looking at the pollution of archival records themselves. Maria Dragoi’s talk reflected on the methods used to manage tsetse fly populations in colonial Zambia, including pesticides, using records from the Natural History Museum’s archive.

Following this, Tatun Harrison-Turnbull discussed plastic pollution. They used the ecopoetic work (a field looking at poetry and nature together) of Adam Dickinson to explore the ideas of archives as literature, and the body as an archive recording the presence of plastic.

The 1892 flooding of the City of York archives was the focus of Fran Mahon’s talk. This explored the archival legacy of the rivers Foss and Ouse. Many of these records remain stained or damaged by mould and the information they contained has partly been lost to the rivers’ floodwaters.

We returned to pesticides for the final contribution of the day, which featured a reading of excerpts from the series FCO 141 held at The National Archives. This was based on research by Elizabeth Haines, Lucy Razzall, and Lora Angelova into contamination in the archive. Their talk also discussed the history of using insecticides on government records held in tropical locations.

Buckingham Palace

16th January, 1963.

Dear Lord Hailsham,

It was very thoughtful of you to write such an interesting letter about the “Silent Spring”. I entirely agree with your assessment of this book.

It is also very encouraging to know that the arrangements for checking and testing poisonous drugs and chemicals is so well developed. Only recently I visited the research laboratories of May and Baker and I was very impressed by their methods and even more by their sense of caution.

There are four groups of people involved in this business:

1. Your ‘muck and magic’ people and all the other cranks.
2. The semi-scientists and experts who having decided on their point of view, refuse to admit that they might be wrong.
3. The farmers who cannot bear to see anything living or breathing on the place which is not directly profitable.
4. That large group of commentators who enter the fray without bothering to find out what it is all about and even if they do make some enquiries merely succeed in misunderstanding the problem.

Only recently I with discussing this problem with a chemical manufacturer and it was quite obvious that he made no distinction between artificial fertilisers and pest and weedkillers. To him they were all agricultural chemicals. I didn’t try and explain the difference between selective and non-selective poisons, that would have fused his brain completely. 

Online symposium

The in-person symposium was followed by an online session which examined regional records of pollution and the polluting impacts of archival practice.

The session started with a panel on local and global pollution. Paul Wright discussed records of the public inquiries surrounding the Trawsfynydd Nuclear Power Station in Eryri National Park. Andrew Loyd Craig then pieced together several global archival collections in his talk on the development of the fertiliser industry in the US South and the British Empire. The Koko Waste Incident in Nigeria was the focus of Olalekan Ojumu’s presentation. This included archival newspaper reports and cartoons examining the local health impact and global response to this major toxic waste leak.

The second panel addressed the issues of pollution in archival preservation. Tushar Kant shared his research into the environmental impact of digital archiving, and methods of making this impact more visible to users. In the final talk of the symposium, Muhammad Tehmash Khan discussed pollution in the largest regional archive of Pakistan, the Sindh Archives in Karachi. Within this, he addressed the challenges of sustainably preserving records on pollution for future research.

Reflections and next steps

The ‘Talking records: Pollution in the Archive’ symposium brought together excellent research. It offered an opportunity to explore some of the urgent questions around pollution. It also reflected on the importance of archives to record and embody stories of pollution. In terms of its impact going forward, the symposium explored new avenues of potential research. This was achieved through discussions across time periods, disciplines, and regions to consider how we can use archives to engage new audiences with pollution histories.

Various research papers offered possible definitions of pollution and showed how these have changed over time resulting in different approaches to the topic. The scope of the papers presented also demonstrated how different types of pollution resist classification. For example, divisions between water, air and land pollution can fail to acknowledge the ways in which pollution impacts entire ecosystems. Interestingly, some papers looked beyond the content of archival records, pointing to the impact of pollution on archives, and even the polluting effects of digital archiving.

Overall, the symposium was a great opportunity to bring researchers and records together. This enabled researchers to reflect on how records can be used to inform historical, social and contemporary research. It has also shown the important role archives play in telling these stories, not only in recording them, but in preserving and, even, producing pollution.