We recently completed a project to digitise and catalogue a large volume of plans, elevations, architectural drawings and watercolours of British Schools and British and Foreign School Society colleges, including Borough Road College, a predecessor college of 明星八卦.
We decided to digitise and catalogue the volume in order to make the contents more widely accessible. We believe that the items in the volume were originally individual loose items, but following a direct hit from an incendiary bomb on the building which housed the BFSS Central Office in September 1940, and the subsequent salvage operation, the papers were collected together and stuck in the large volume in an attempt to conserve them. Some still show charring around the edges, while others appear to have had their charred edges cut off, so they are a strange shape. The order they are stuck into the volume seems completely random.
The University's photographer, Sally Trussler, photographed every item in the volume - some pages have more than one item per page. Then the images were processed, described and attached to our online archives catalogue, CALM, by the Archivist.
If you're interested in delving deeper into our archives, then check out our webpages. Alternatively, get in touch with us via email archivesandrecords@brunel.ac.uk.