Climate and Ecological Emergency: Archives & Special Collections

The Common Ground archive has rich potential for interdisciplinary research on a wide range of areas, including geography, literature, the visual arts, and business studies. Some possible areas of research are listed below.

• Environmental issues in the UK - Research material relating to a range of environmental issues - including the climate emergency, pollution, deforestation, flooding, droughts, natural disasters, the use of pesticides, and habitat loss - can be found within the archive. The archive also includes a variety of responses to these issues such as ideas for and examples of local conservation, as well as reports, policies and strategies by the British Government and environmental organisations. 
• Project planning - The archive contains project planning papers for each of its projects, from the early 1980s to 2013. This material includes planning notes, project proposals, grant applications, meeting minutes, correspondence, and project reports. These records can be used to understand how arts and environmental are planned and organised, as well as provide insight into Common Ground's practices in particular.
• Sustainability - Common Ground has pioneered several projects that were designed to be sustainable and encourage long-term local action without extra support from the charity, in particular, the ‘Parish Maps' project and ‘Apple Day’ The success of the sustainability of Common Ground projects can be researched through reports, correspondence, and press clippings in the archive.
• Relationship between nature and culture - Common Ground believes that the combination of nature and culture makes each place unique, and this forms the basis of its work to stimulate public interest and enthusiasm for the commonplace in our localities. Research into archive material relating to the different projects can shed light on how Common Ground explored the links between nature and culture, especially through its commissioning of artwork, prose, music, and poetry, and organisation of cultural events.
• Sense of place -  Sense of place has been explored by Common Ground through the concept of 'Local Distinctiveness', a term developed by the charity in the early 1980s to examine the relationship between places, people, nature and identity. Correspondence, notes, essays and promotional material relating to the 'Campaign for Local Distinctiveness' can provide more insight into the development of this concept.
• British culture and landscape - In its mission to raise awareness of what makes our everyday places distinctive and unique, Common Ground collected a vast amount of research material on British landscapes, wildlife, buildings, art, music, literature, customs, history, heritage, and folklore. Research material, promotional material, correspondence and more in the archive, which was arranged by Common Ground alphabetically by subject, can be used to research contemporary Britain.

This Common Ground archive is currently in the process of being catalogued. You can search the archive in our online archives catalogue as the project progresses, or find out more about the archive and the cataloguing project in our project blog.