Historic Towns Trust: mapping from the ground up

Since 1955, the European atlas programme behind the Historic Towns Trust has promoted the comparative study of towns and cities through maps drawn to a common scale. The Trust produces the British Historic Towns Atlas, whose first volume appeared in 1969 and, fittingly for a series of postcards from Nottingham, mapped Nottingham among its eight towns. One conference delegate, Ryan Rowberry of Georgia State University, pointed us towards the Trust at our table, and it turns out they are mappers, too!

Today the Trust is a registered charity whose work centres on “inspiring future generations to understand, appreciate and preserve their urban heritage”. Its multi-layer maps show how Britain’s towns developed over the centuries. Seven atlas volumes have been published so far, and the maps and articles from the first three, Nottingham included, can be downloaded from its website. The Trust also gives free public talks, publishes news and blog posts, and makes Place Detectives, maps with school resources that show children what makes their own town special.

What makes the Trust a good fit for this postcard is how its maps get made. Each new town map relies on a local group of historians, archaeologists and geographers, who agree what the map should show and research its buildings, place-names and activities. A local lead passes all of this to the cartographer, and the group also raises most of the funding, since it is best placed to build enthusiasm and tap local sources. The expertise and much of the money come from the places being mapped. Alongside these local groups, the Trust works with university departments, academics across several disciplines, and learned societies.

So, what does the Trust teach us about infrastructure? That it can be a shared method as much as a building or a department, and that it should involve the communities whose history it records. Agreed scales and ways of working, a cartographer and knowledge gathered town by town add up to maps that can be compared across Britain and beyond, much as shared categories let us compare infrastructures on our own map. That kind of work offers a model for keeping knowledge that crosses sectors, which can otherwise fall by the wayside between universities, learned societies and local groups.

Professor Vanessa Harding (Birkbeck, University of London), who chaired the Trust from 2022 to 2026, told us:

Both the trust itself and the projects it undertakes with partners rely on goodwill – generosity with time, expertise, funding, and other resources – and this is both a great strength and a potential risk or precarity, as circumstances and parties change over time. The trust is small and modestly endowed, so committed and enthusiastic volunteer trustees, with a range of academic and other backgrounds, are vital to making it work. Together we’re ambitious to fulfil our vision and keen to find different ways of bringing this about. Strong and successful partnerships with other parties are absolutely the key to getting things done.

The PGR and ECR view: centres as internal glue

Ask postgraduate or early career researchers what infrastructure means to them and the answer is close to home. Departments can stay siloed within their remits; centres cut across them, speak to school-wide priorities and, for PhD candidates, function as internal connections.

Finn Caddell (a History PhD candidate at Nottingham funded through the ESRC Midlands Graduate School, working on plague outbreaks and local courts in later fourteenth-century England and Wales) also handed us our favourite feature request of the conference: teaching opportunities on the map. They circulate by word of mouth and go stale quickly; a live, refreshed listing would be essential for PGRs.

Dr Jake Stattel (Research Fellow at Girton College, Cambridge, whose PhD examined the Danelaw and Scandinavian influence on English law) named the same pattern at Cambridge: the Centre for English Legal History as the internal glue that “opened the horizons” in terms of connectivity and exposure to cross-disciplinarity, and the student-maintained Cambridge Legal and Social History Workshop (open to anyone, hybrid) as a textbook informal infrastructure living on word of mouth.

Medieval studies at Cambridge: building the next infrastructure

Jake is also building infrastructure of his own: a revival of a medieval studies network at Cambridge, bringing history, literature, archaeology and more into one conversation, with a Girton-internal medieval initiative alongside. His rationale points outwards. Some of it is experience. For example, the Centre for English Legal History at Cambridge showed him what happens when researchers from different paths come together.

The Network itself was inspired by the success of Oxford Medieval Studies, whose co-director, Professor Henrike Lähnemann, and communications officer, Dr Tristan Alphey, gave him practical advice. Some of it looks to the future, and the future means prospective students and researchers-to-be. He stressed the importance of showcasing the disciplinary expansiveness of medieval studies (and the many things one can do with it). It is an argument that carries extra weight while the humanities are pressed to demonstrate their applicability.

The Network is starting out with two years of funding and aims to grow from there, seeking further support beyond Cambridge, which is a familiar trajectory for new centres, and one reason a living map matters.

Jake describes the Cambridge Medieval Studies Network like this:

This is intended to connect and encourage collaboration among those researching and teaching the Medieval World across Cambridge’s many Faculties and Departments, fostering an even more vibrant intellectual community for both academics and students.

The Stair Society: ninety years on subscriptions

Founded in 1934, the Stair Society is Scotland’s leading legal history society: a self-funded charity that has kept a national scholarly enterprise running for over ninety years on membership subscription and volunteer governance. It has published more than sixty-five volumes of original documents and rare works, now searchable online through its HeinOnline partnership; it has hosted annual lectures since 1965; and last year it marked its ninetieth anniversary with a courtroom moot in Parliament House, Edinburgh, where undergraduate teams argued a problem under the law of 1851 before a Senator of the College of Justice and a public audience. Preservation, transmission, convening, funding, signposting – the Stair Society really has the full infrastructural repertoire.

At the table, we close-read the Society’s web presence with its Publicity and Engagement Officer, Dr Alice Krzanich, University of Aberdeen. Keywords check! Description check! Then we got to partnerships, and the further we dug, the more we found: the HeinOnline digitisation, the Faculty of Advocates hosting the AGM, universities fielding mooting teams, a judiciary willing to sit for an undergraduate moot in Parliament House. The Society even keeps a curated Legal History Links page (a small map of the field in its own right) pointing readers to national records projects, digitised registers, and its sister societies in Ireland, Australia and North America. Ninety years of connection, worn lightly. The Society publishes its constitution, its accounts, its funding policy (a candour many far larger organisations never manage); it signposts the field generously; and then mentions its own convening power almost in passing.

We found the website errs on the side of modesty. That seems to be the way of learned societies: the volumes appear, the lectures happen, the moots fill a courtroom, and the story gets told in instalments, a paragraph here, a photograph there, dispersed across the years.

As mappers, we spend a lot of time translating modesty. The map’s job is to introduce infrastructures to people who did not know to look for them: a record sits alongside hundreds of others, found through a tag, a keyword, or a wander across the country. So, it matters that each one foregrounds the whole spectrum of an infrastructure’s activity (the publishing and the convening, the collaborations, the funding and the signposting). We cannot always get it right from the outside, which is why we check (with the people at the table, at our annual catch-ups, in our focus groups) and why every record stays open to correction from the people who know it best.

Alice says:

The Stair Society is keen to promote Scottish legal history in a variety of ways. The annual volume (free to members) showcases important scholarship in this field, as does our Annual Lecture. Our website provides a good overview of our activities, including links to recordings of some of our recent lectures (available to watch for free) and we have a social media presence as well through LinkedIn, X and Facebook.

What we took away

Lay all of the case studies across this blog series side by side and one can see the difference and variety within a single research ecosystem. No two infrastructures are the same. Many run on subscriptions and volunteer councils; others on goodwill and intermittent project grants; others through seed funding that aims to grow through external support; others have public-service budgets outside research altogether. What they share is function. They convene, preserve, bridge, and bring people together around research.

Much of the labour is uncosted, so it does not leave a clean trace in funding data. Meanwhile, infrastructures defined by what they enable can fall outside definitions of “research infrastructure” built around funding capacity. The map recognises the function. This is the intervention, and it is why community archives, record offices, learned societies, and even informal workshops belong alongside the centres and institutes. The two layers are hardly separate anyway. As every case study above shows, centres and institutes work with the community archives and the grassroots initiatives, and the map endeavours to record those relationships, too.

Are you on the map?

As we have said before, the map is very much a living resource. If you lead or belong to an infrastructure at the meeting point of law and the humanities (a centre, society, archive, network, workshop, or something our categories have not caught up with yet) you can check your record to make sure you are adequately represented, or add one.

This autumn we are also running our annual catch-up exercise, reaching out to infrastructures to confirm what is running and how the field is faring. Write to us at mapping@sas.ac.uk. If the conversations above show anything, it is that what an infrastructure puts into the public record can determine who finds it.

📍Are you on the map? Check here. |🗺️ Explore the map | Add your infrastructure |📥Get in touch → mapping@sas.ac.uk