A Wellcome Trust Research Resources Project

Our Wellcome Trust Research Resources funded project “Poverty, Health, Diet and Education in Glasgow: from Domestic Science to the Allied Health Professions, 1875-1993” is now finished. With its completion comes three comprehensive online catalogues, a glimpse into the archives via a new online exhibition and a set of blogs and tweets built up over a one year period. The door is now open for you to delve in and better understand the amazing story of one strand of our founding institutions.

This project has allowed us to open up access to three collections from our own history as a University; the Glasgow School of Cookery (1875-1908), the West End School of Cookery (1878-1908) and the Queen’s College, Glasgow (formerly the Glasgow and West of Scotland College of Domestic Science (1907-1993)).

During 2018, as well as cataloguing the records, the project’s Archivist, Kirsty Menzies, gave a public lecture on the formidable Mary Andross and ensured her inclusion in the Glasgow Science Festival Monumental project. The story of the Glasgow and West of Scotland College of Domestic Science was told as part of STV’s People’s History Show (20th August 2018 episode) and we participated in various alumni and community engagement events.

By means of an introduction to the records Kirsty has created a digital exhibition and recorded a video talking about the project and highlighting a selection of her favourite items from the collections (also below).

Archive Centres are huge treasure chests of people’s stories and it is our job to make these stories accessible for everyone. Once we have unlocked the content our reward is to see what people do with it – from our own researchers to the general public, school students to academics, genealogists to journalists, authors to artists.

The collections are open to all via our Archive Centre.

Project thanks

Thanks to Kirsty Menzies for a year of hard work, dedication and passion. Kirsty has thrown herself wholeheartedly into this project leaving the fruits of her labour for others to enjoy.

The wider Archive Centre team have supported Kirsty with preservation work, packaging, cleaning, digitisation, social media and standardisation, so thanks are due to Simon Docherty, David Ward and Heather Panayiotaki. During the year we also had help from volunteers John Loudon and Vivian Gounari.

Finally, a huge thank you to the Wellcome Trust for funding this project.

Carole McCallum
University Archivist