By Camille Moret, University Archivist.

Today, the Open Research team celebrates School Archives Day, as an initiative by Loughborough University Archive and SARA, the School Archives and Records Association. But why would we, as a University, have anything to do with schools? Some of us may remember we used to be a Technical Institute and many variations of a College, but never a School surely… Well, it turns out that, for a while, Loughborough College, predecessor to Loughborough University, housed a Junior School, where under 18s would be taught in preparation for college years. 

This means that amongst our holdings of research papers, all grown students’ memories, and very serious higher education “stuff”, childhood stories and voices loiter… We hold the archives of Loughborough College School (LCS), which date back as far as the 17^th Century, and has seen many generations of pupils, and continues to shape Loughborough communities today as Charnwood College. 

We “only” have records from the 20^th and 21^st Centuries, but there is a wealth of photographs to help us remember what it would have been like to study Handicrafts, Domestic Science, Art, and so much more. Alumni of Loughborough College School have been kindly donating and adding to the collection over the years: thanks to them and to the very active School Association, users can now read about what it was like to shop for uniforms in the 1950s (not exactly something for the runway!), or marvel at the labour of love that is Susan Beall’s sewing and embroidering diary. Through this collection, we connect to the past in a very vivid and immediate way, learning how people lived, worked and played, as far back as the 1920s. 

Loughborough University Archive has retro-converted the paper-based finding aid for the LCS collection. The new catalogue is available on our AtoM database and some information is also available on ArchiveHub, which will be more familiar and accessible to some of our users. If you wish to consult materials, comment or add to descriptions, you are very welcome to do so, by contacting the Loughborough University Archivist. 

If you were once (or still are) a pupil at Loughborough College School, Burleigh College or Charnwood College, why not tell us what it was like? Maybe browsing our new catalogue for the collection will ring a bell? Tell us all about it in the comments section or head out to our BlueSky and Instagram accounts with the following hashtags #SchoolArchivesDay #ArchiveHashtag. 

P.S. LCS is not the only local collection the University holds. Image above shows the records of Clemerson Department Store, which are registers from the turn of the Century – Records of Clemerson Department Store – Loughborough University Library