Centre for The Historical Record

Origins and Purpose

The Centre for the Historical Record (CHR) at Kingston University was launched in 2011 to promote collaborative research and knowledge exchange between historians, archivists, museum curators, heritage providers and members of the public with an interest in history. It has cultivated strong links with organizations and professional bodies in the field of public history and has run seminars and public events on a wide variety of subjects from digitizing archives to using social media for research and talks by high profile public historians.

Projects

The CHR has also specialized in digitizing historical records with help from volunteers and has been home to a number of major research projects including a database of nineteenth-century Children’s Hospital records. We have also worked with the British Red Cross to digitize Voluntary Aid Detachment records that detail the service of both ordinary, and some more famous, people during World War 1. For more information on these see our Projects pages.

Kingston staff have also worked closely with other history project initiatives. Both Dr. Sue Hawkins and Dr. Steven Woodbridge, for example, contributed to the ‘Surrey and the Great War’ project run recently by Surrey County Council via their archives centre, the Surrey History Centre, at Woking. Sue also contributed two chapters to the edited book that resulted from this major 5-year project, In the Shadow of the Great War, Surrey 1914-1922 (The History Press, 2019).

If you would like to know more about the CHR please contact Sue Hawkins , Honorary Research Fellow in History, Humanities Dept., Holmewood House, Penrhyn Road campus, or phone 0208 417 2359, or write to the Humanities department in the School of Art (KSA) at Kingston.