It is with great sadness that we report the death of Dr Chris Wilkes from a  heart attack on Friday 18 March. He had worked at Ruskin during  three decades, initially as general secretary and more recently as principal. A historian by initial qualification at the University of Reading he was always supportive of initiatives […]

Readers may be interested to see these images recently taken by former student Bill Whitehead of the Ruskin College site in Walton Street. Not only have all the 1960s buildings been destroyed but also the early twentieth century building. Only the facade on Walton Street and Worcester Place remain.

Following on from the recent addition of some entries on Conscientious Objectors who had been Ruskin students Cyril Pearce has written: ‘In a new initiative in the study of the impact of the First World War on Britain, in the autumn of 2014, the Imperial War Museum will be publishing on-line a unique source for […]

Alan Shepherd, current secretary of the Ruskin Fellowship, has recently written a pamphlet with information about former Ruskin students during the 1914 – 18 war. In addition to the brief entries included to date in the archives database on this website , various students are mentioned including Ernest Ashmore, J.L.Murray,Albert Tompkins,Gilbert Ward, Fred Hanham, Fred […]

Congratulations to Dr Chris Wilkes, who has been announced as the new principal for Ruskin College. Click here for more details.

H.D. (“Billy)” Hughes – an Appreciation Billy Hughes was Ruskin College Principal from 1950 to 1979. He, and the Vice-Principal, Henry Smith interviewed me for a place on the OU Diploma course in Economics and Political Science in the Spring of 1962. I was offered the place and began my course in October of that […]

Just added is a new entry from one of the first students to have taken Women’s Studies at Ruskin in 1993, Marie Thompson.  Many notable women have been ‘graduates’ of Ruskin: not least Annie Kenney, leading member of the WSPU, who was a correspondence course student.  Women were not admitted as residential students until after […]

The History@Work website – a multi-authored blog sponsored by the American based National Council on Public History as a digital meeting place for all those interested in the practice and study of public history – has just included an article by Hilda Kean on newruskinarchives. The NCPH was especially helpful in spreading the word about […]

We have been contacted by an Oxford based firm, podcats,(sic) that has been commissioned by the BBC to produce a number of features for BBC Radio Oxford as part of a countrywide project to mark the centenary of The Great War. One of the features concerns Belgian refugees who were brought to Oxford and housed […]