In this post, Rachel Dishington and Sarah Colborne reflect on their October 2025 exhibition titled ‘The Leen: Nottingham’s River’ at the Weston Gallery at Lakeside Arts in Nottingham, based around the River Leen and its longstanding connections with the city.
Organised around the geographical course of the river, the exhibition narrates histories of recreation and wildlife, urbanisation and the industrial growth of Nottingham’s textiles industry, problems of water access, pollution, and flooding, and the engineering and governance systems created to address them. Reflecting on the design of the exhibition, Rachel and Sarah realised the experiences of those who lived and worked alongside the river were missing.
To address this, they designed a public engagement programme to run alongside the exhibition to connect personal experiences and memories with the institutional and organisational records in the archive, funded by an RHS Scouloudi Public History Grant.
Exhibiting The Leen: Nottingham’s River
The River Leen is a 15-mile tributary of the River Trent. From its North Nottinghamshire source near Newstead Abbey, famously home to the poet Lord Byron, it runs south through the city of Nottingham before flowing into the Trent.
Despite its small size, the Leen played a foundational role in shaping modern Nottingham environmentally, economically and politically: the 1877 Nottingham Borough Extension Act which extended the boundaries of the city to close to its current area was carried out ‘for the execution of the Nottingham and Leen District Sewerage Act’ to address the problem of pollution of the Leen.
In October 2025, we curated an exhibition titled ‘The Leen: Nottingham’s River’ at the Weston Gallery at Lakeside Arts in Nottingham, based around the River Leen and its longstanding connections with the city. The gallery is especially designed for the display of archive materials, and the exhibition drew from the collections of the University of Nottingham’s Manuscripts and Special Collections. These included the records of the Trent River Authority and records of local landowners as well as the surviving records of local businesses which used to be based along the river.
Exhibition poster for The Leen: Nottingham’s River
Organised around the geographical course of the river, the exhibition narrates histories of recreation and wildlife, urbanisation and the industrial growth of Nottingham’s textiles industry, problems of water access, pollution, and flooding, and the engineering and governance systems created to address them.
Because of the archival materials available, the stories in the exhibition are primarily institutional, reflecting the perspectives of those with economic, political or scientific authority. Reflecting on the materials while designing the exhibition, we realised the experiences of those who lived and worked alongside the river were missing.
To address this, we designed a public engagement programme to run alongside the exhibition to connect personal experiences and memories with the institutional and organisational records in the archive.
Photos of the exhibition
The ‘Living and Working Along the Leen’ Event
A key step in seeking out and integrating community perspectives was through a reminiscence event which we organised on Thursday 13 November 2025 in the Weston Gallery and an adjoining room at Lakeside Arts. Funding towards costs came from an award of a Royal Historical Society Scouloudi Public History Grant. The event was facilitated by historical geographers from the School of Geography, archivists from Manuscripts and Special Collections, and community volunteers with interests in archives and local history and experience of oral history methods.
Fifty people attended the fully booked event over the course of the day. The exhibition featured as a venue, a tool for recruiting participants, and a discussion prompt, with many attendees visiting the exhibition before dropping in to the adjoining room to share memories with the team. In the adjoining room, photographs from businesses which used to be based along the river were displayed on a screen and copies of maps from the archive collections were laid out on tables. Staff worked collaboratively with attendees to help “map their memories”.
Copies of maps from the archives were used as visual aids to pinpoint locations for participants’ memories.
Participants annotated the maps using stickers and post-it notes.
Types of participation varied: some attendees recorded snapshot oral histories of their experiences with the Leen using audio recording devices, others contributed written memories on paper or used post-it notes to annotate the maps provided.
Others still engaged with the event in more unexpected ways. Some were interested in learning more about local history and came to ask questions about the history and geography of Nottingham and the Leen. Others shared memories of Nottingham’s past and their own lives that they felt were not directly connected with the river including stories of urban development, housing, transport and recreation. Many chose not to contribute to the recorded aspect of the day, preferring to discuss memories informally with one another and with staff.
Staff recording reminiscences (photo by Filsan Hirmoge)
The event was also an opportunity for participants to bring along materials of their own, either to prompt discussions or to donate to the archives. The presence of tactile objects, and the rare opportunity to handle these items while asking questions of the donors added to the collective feeling that the event was offering something much more special than a usual visit to the exhibition where artefacts and documents are locked away in glass cases.
Photographs of former workers were scoured for familiar faces, and for those who found maps confusing or intimidating, these offered an accessible gateway to unlocking the past.
A donation of business records from Weldon & Wilkinson Limited, hosiery dyers and finishers which operated alongside the Leen from 1897 to 1982 (photo by Filsan Hirmoge).
Discussing artefacts brought in by participants.
Participants were often clearly involved in their own research – one had gathered information on the willow plantations which supplied the local basket weaving industry, and another was attempting to identify the source of spring water sold by the firm his father had worked for.
The drop in, relaxed and open-ended nature of the event encouraged informal discussion and connection. Several groups of participants recorded oral histories together, discussing memories with one another and creating collective historical narratives.
Participants sharing memories with each other (photo by Filsan Hirmoge).
Unexpected connections were discovered between attendees – memorably, the winning goal scorer from a football match between two local companies in 1974 discovered that another participant’s father had been affiliated with the losing side. Attendees asked one another questions and shared expertise – retired engineers who attended, for example, explained technical aspects of the construction of a 1960s flood defence scheme to other participants. Many such connections and conversations happened without staff involvement and were only later reported to us in the snapshots we recorded. It’s likely that even more happened over the course of the day without staff being made aware of them.
Reflections
The recordings and their transcripts, together with the written submissions, have been added to the archival holdings at the University of Nottingham for future researchers to explore. Excerpts from the recordings will also be added to the exhibition using a listening kiosk device, placing the personal memories and lived experiences of members of the public in dialogue with the institutional and technical histories of the River Leen represented in the exhibition.
We also hope to create a portable story map where the recordings will be integrated with other elements of the exhibition and geolocated using a 3D model of the River Leen catchment for use in future research and public engagement.
In a world where climate change is reshaping river systems and causing unprecedented challenges in managing our rivers, there is a pressing need to consider the place of water in our cities and communities.
Our public history work demonstrates the significance of stories from the past in laying the foundations for this conversation, providing opportunities for contemporary river managers such as the Environment Agency to connect with the public in understanding the river’s significance and planning for its future. Through collaboration between archivists, environmental scientists, volunteers, academics and the public, our work on the Leen aims to prompt and inform discussion of the future of the river and its role in the city in a way that acknowledges the past, values local knowledge, experience and memory, and places local people and their relationship with the river at the centre of the story.
About the authors
Rachel Dishington is a Research Fellow in the School of Geography at the University of Nottingham.
Sarah Colborne is Collections Archivist at Manuscripts and Special Collections at the University of Nottingham.
About the RHS / Scouloudi Public History Grants
Scouloudi Public History Grants support innovative practice in public history and provide funding for defined projects by historians working together in and beyond higher education. Launched in 2025, this programme is generously supported by the Scouloudi Foundation.
Grants support historians, working both within and beyond higher education, to pursue projects that involve and are designed for public audiences and address subjects of public interest.
The first set of grants in this new programme were awarded in mid-2025 to the following four projects:
- Rachel Dishington (University of Nottingham) and Sarah Colborne (University of Nottingham Archives) , ‘Living and Working Along the Leen’
- Iqbal Singh (The National Archives) and Eleanor Newbigin (SOAS), ‘Participatory workshops on colonial history for historians in higher education, the GLAM sector and community history groups’
- Kathleen McIlvenna (University of Derby) and Kate Crossley (Arkwright Society) , ‘Re-interpreting Florence Nightingale in Derbyshire’
- Rachel Delman (Oxford) and James Spellane (The Charterhouse), ‘London’s Watery Heritage: Co-producing New Knowledge about the Charterhouse Water Maps’
The next call for applications, for 2026-27, is expected to open on 23 March 2026 and close on 5 June 2026. Our thanks to the generous support of the Scouloudi Foundation to enable a second year of this programme.
Grants will be awarded for projects that require small-scale funding to begin and complete a defined phase of work, or continue to a next defined phase of a larger project. Recipients will be expected to undertake their project between July 2026 and June 2027.
In offering these grants, the Society seeks to encourage collaborative work across the history professions, and to provide necessary financial support for non-academic participants which is often unavailable through existing funding schemes.
