Resource pack - Pollution in the Archive

Programme

4 December 2025 (in-person)

Land: Agriculture, mining, and waste management

Reading Between the lines: 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

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

Screening

The Contract: Imperial legacies of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) Pipeline, Christina Danielle Bartson

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, Christopher Day

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

5 December 2025 (online)

Local and global pollution

Nuclear perpetrations in the thoughtful landscapes of Eryri National Park, Paul Wright

Mapping the ‘vast fecal resources’ of the Archive, Andrew Loyd Craig

Pollution, memory and the Koko Waste Incident in Nigeria, Olalekan Ojumu

Preserving the past, protecting the future

Designing digital archives with ecological accountability, Tushar Kant

Visualising pollution and the challenges of archival preservation in developing countries: Lessons from Pakistan, Tehmash Khan

The pollution reporter app and The Land and Refinery project, Kristen Bos

Pollution in records at The National Archives

Many different government departments may contain information about environmental pollution and damage. Try searching our catalogue for:

• terms such as ‘emissions’ with ‘vehicle’ or ‘carbon’
• terms used before the phrase ‘climate change’ was adopted, including ‘global warming’ and ‘ozone’ may produce more results
• ‘contamination’ or ‘pollution’; these terms will return many results
• names of specific contaminants or harmful substances
• names of places where contamination or other kinds of environmental damage has occurred
• names of natural disasters, such as ‘floods’ or ‘earthquakes’ plus dates
• names of industrial sites, such as ‘gas works’, ‘steel plants’, ‘oil refineries’, ‘tanneries’, ‘chemical factories’
• broad terms such as ‘dangerous substances’ or ‘chemical processing’

The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution

The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution was established as a standing body by Royal Warrant in February 1970 to advise on matters, both national and international, concerning:

• the pollution of the environment
• the adequacy of research in this field
• the future possibilities of danger to the environment

Click here for a broad breakdown of the records of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution held by The National Archives. The Commission closed in 2014 - see its archived website on the UK Government Web Archive.

Mining

There is a large amount of material on coal mining and other types of mining among our records, especially when it took place on Crown land. For more detailed information on these records see our guide to Mines and Mining.

Pesticides

The Pesticides Safety Directorate (PSD), an executive agency of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), is responsible for the administration of systems for pesticide licensing, approval and control for the protection of wildlife and plant life. Search in MAF and SE files for records of the PSD. Try searching for individual pesticides such as DDT.

Radioactive waste

Under the Atomic Energy Authority Act 1945 and the Radioactive Substances Act 1960, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) and the Ministry of Housing and Local Government were made jointly responsible for authorising the discharge of radioactive waste from nuclear installations. MAFF carried out monitoring and sampling at disposal sites, prepared reports on those sites and participated in emergency planning.

Some key records are among the files of the:

• Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries and Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food in MAF 209
• Fisheries Radiobiological Laboratory are in MAF 336
• Advisory Panel on Discharge of Radioactive Wastes records in MAF 298
• Department of the Environment and predecessors relating to the safe disposal of radioactive waste are in HLG 120 (many relate to named sites)
• Department for Energy in EG 2
• Hinkley Point C Inquiry in EG 4
• Building Research Council in DSIR 4 (includes technical papers and reports about the disposal of radioactive waste)
• UK Atomic Energy Authority are in the AB series.
• For the disposal of radioactive waste at sea, see FO 371
• For atomic trials in Australia, see DEFE 16

Military damage

First World War files about crashed aircrafts in Britain are in AIR 1. For more information, see the guide on RAF operations.

Files on the dumping of ammunition at the end of the Second World War, mostly overseas or at sea, are held among:

• War Office records in WO 32, WO 199 and WO 208
• Admiralty records in ADM 1 and ADM 228
• Air Ministry records in AIR 40 and AIR 51

The records of all the defence departments contain information about experiments with, and the use and production of, chemicals, plastics and other synthetic materials of all kinds. For records relating to explosives and the Royal Gunpowder Factories at Waltham Abbey and Faversham, see WO 385 and WO 397. Records of the Explosives Research and Development Establishment are in AVIA 67.

Environmental protest

Records of protest relating to climate change and the environment can be found in various series. These include records on protests around the development of the Hinkley Point nuclear power stations in EG 4, or specific environmentalist organisations including Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office: Marine and Transport Department (FCO 76).

Some of these records may be closed, see here for information on making a freedom of information request.

Projects and resources of interest

Digital Domesday: Unlocking historical collections with searchable image access

Domesday Book is the oldest government record held in The National Archives. Commissioned in 1086 by King William I (the Conqueror), it contains a great deal of information about England in the 11th century (property owners and land value). 

With the new project Digital Domesday, the Research team is experimenting with new technologies to explore how to unlock historical collections with searchable image access. This approach will not only enhance public and scholarly engagement, but also ensure that collections can be treated as structured data for computational analysis, visualisation, and reuse. By presenting sources as both images and searchable text, Digital Domesday shows how archives can be explored with transparency, provenance, and interpretive richness, enabling new forms of discovery and storytelling.

‘Rediscovering the Tudor Doomsday’

The Valor Ecclesiasticus was a nationwide survey commissioned by Henry VIII on the property and wealth of 16th century England and Wales. Funded by a grant of almost £1.5m from UK Research & Innovation’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, ‘Rediscovering the Tudor Doomsday’ will make this survey publicly accessible for the first time.

The survey set out to discover the financial state of the Church of which Henry VIII had just made himself head of following his break with Rome. It intended to capture comprehensive details of the infrastructure and income of 8000 parish churches, 650 monasteries, 22 cathedrals and countless chantries, colleges, hospitals and schools together with the people earning their living with them or from them. It describes agricultural land, woodland and waterways and working buildings from market stalls and mills to open-cast coal mines. It identifies the men, women and children who between them led, laboured for or benefited from these enterprises; and focuses the objects and outcomes of their efforts, recording livestock and crops and calculating yields and prices. Even local environmental conditions and weather patterns are noted in passing.

Led by the University of Exeter, The Tudor Domesday establishes a partnership with The National Archives, the University of Nottingham, the University of Reading, the National Trust as well as community groups in the South, Midlands and North.

Digitisation of the National Farm Survey of England and Wales 1941-1943

The 1941 National Farm Survey is one of the most comprehensive records of land that we hold in our collection and is a window in time on the UK’s agriculture and land use in the middle of the Second World War. Containing extensive data on over 300,000 English and Welsh farms, the survey is among the most-requested record series at The National Archives.

Currently, the complex filing of the paper record makes it difficult for readers to order and use, with the records only available in physical copy. This project will digitise the series in full and create a new digital cataloguing arrangement to make each farm searchable online.

The many lives of cardboard

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council(AHRC), The many lives of cardboard (January 2026–April 2027) will interrogate the pasts, presents and futures of cardboard at a time of environmental crisis.

This collaboration between The National Archives, the University of Edinburgh and the University of the Highlands and Islands will bring histories of cardboard in the records of the state into conversation with people, collections, and institutions in the local lives of this everyday material around the British Isles. It will interrogate the potential of the archive and heritage collections for understanding the histories and futures of cardboard; investigate the diverse roles of cardboard in creative and sustainable cultures and economies; and assess how the many lives of cardboard offer a model for approaching material histories more broadly, through arts and humanities and cultural heritage research.

Environmental Sustainability Hub

The Archive Sector Leadership team at The National Archives is currently developing an Environmental Sustainability Hub with guidance for the archives sector. Once available, this will be published here: Advice and guidance - Archives sector.

Articles

Lucy Razzall, Lora Angelova, and Elizabeth Haines, ‘From habitat to service equipment: The British Government book as container in the tropics’, Inscription: The Journal of Material Text – Theory, Practice, History (2025)

Marc Vermeulen, Samuel P. Johns, Gwen dePolo, Pedro Maximo Rocha, Matthew J. Collins, Lora Angelova, Mélanie Roffet-Salque, 'Assessing the effect of minimally invasive lipid extraction on parchment integrity by artificial ageing and integrated analytical techniques’, Polymer Degradation and Stability, Volume 230 (2024)

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