About the Modern Records Centre

The Modern Records Centre now

Laid end to end, the Modern Records Centre's current archive collections would stretch for more than 16 kilometres. Our archives are stored in climate controlled secure storage on the University of Warwick's central campus and in an offsite store built specially for the Library and MRC in 2022.

Open five days a week, the MRC searchroom provides visitors with a dedicated research space to access our collections with the support of knowledgeable staff. Our separate exhibition space showcases material from our collections.

Our internationally significant collections support teaching within the University of Warwick, with archival research and MRC resources embedded into university modules. During the 2024/5 academic year, MRC staff provided direct archival assistance to more than 500 Warwick students in 50 introductory sessions for nine different academic departments. We also work with local schools and community groups to promote our collections and encourage new generations of researchers.

As well as our core research collections we also preserve and make available the University's own archives, including born digital corporate records, and work with Marketing and Communications, the Alumni Office and others within the University Community and beyond to promote and celebrate our University's past and present.

Since 2011, the Modern Records Centre has worked to widen access to our collections through digitisation. Thousands of primary sources are now freely available to researchers through our digitised collections and our dedicated digitisation staff continue to develop resources to showcase highlights from our collections and support research.

The twenty first century has seen the advent of digital record keeping and both born digital and digitised content now form an important part of our archival holdings. The MRC's digital preservation team work to ensure that the fragile digital record will remain accessible long after the content was created.

Although the nature of our collections may change, our core function remains the same. To preserve and provide access to the unique archives within our care.

The origins of the Modern Records Centre

The Modern Records Centre (MRC) has its roots in the growth in interest in social history and 'history from below' during the 1960s and 1970s. In 1960 the historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote an article for the journal of the British Records Association on ‘Records of the Trade Union Movement’, in which he summarised the state of play – a situation where the majority of records were still in the ownership of the unions themselves, stored in a range of environmental conditions, often unavailable to outside researchers, and at risk of destruction. In his words, “for many of [the unions,] 'old papers' merely clutter up the place, and are likely to disappear on suitable occasions, even without the aid of the wartime salvage drive, and the bombing which hit the headquarters of several societies. New general secretaries come, and there is an office clear-out. Unions move … and a lot of papers go. Union headquarters are reconstructed … and a pile of old papers kept in the cellar vanishes”. Hobsbawm concluded by emphasising the importance of the records as “essential to all social and economic historians of modern Britain” and suggested that the reason for their neglect by researchers was due to fragmentation of sources across multiple organisations, and lack of guides or catalogues turning “even quite simple pieces of research [into] major tasks of exploration”. “These records are scattered, largely unsurveyed, and rather difficult to use at present. But they are there; and in considerable quantity. … Is it not time to give due weight in our historical researches to the activities of what are, after all, the majority of the occupied citizens of our country? The sources exist. We have only to utilise them”.

The Modern Records Centre was created to help preserve this key source for modern British history. The impetus for the MRC came from two University of Warwick research centres – the Centre for the Study of Social History, founded by E.P. Thompson in 1968, and the Industrial Relations Research Unit, established in 1970. Three academics, George Bain, Hugh Clegg, and Royden Harrison, submitted a bid to the Leverhulme Trust with the stated aim to create a Centre “to search out, collect, and make available for research purposes – and for posterity – the primary sources for British political, social, and economic history with particular reference to labour history and industrial relations”.

The bid was successful and in 1973 the MRC was formed as the first archival institution which had preservation of national trade union records as part of its core collecting policy. Over the half a century and more of our existence we’ve taken in tens of thousands of boxes of archives which represent the story of trade unionism and industrial relations from the era of the Tolpuddle Martyrs in the 1830s to the present day. The vital role of the employers is represented in our archives too, with core collections from employers' organisations such as the Confederation of British Industry, Federation of British Industries and the Shipping Federation.

Our collections also include the institutional records of the University of Warwick and significant archives relating to campaign and pressure groups, professional associations, fringe political parties and transport.

Images of the Modern Records Centre, including students outside the entrance, one of the archive strongrooms, a student looking through archives in our seminar room, digitisation in progress, and our archive searchroom