Beyond the Margins: a new way to explore the Gertrude Bell Archive
Newcastle University's Special Collections and the School of History, Classics and Archaeology announce launch of a new site, allowing a global audience to navigate the UNESCO Gertrude Bell Archive.
6 May 2025
Archive website launch
Newcastle University's Special Collections and the School of History, Classics and Archaeology are delighted to announce the launch of a new site, allowing a global audience to navigate the UNESCO Gertrude Bell Archive for the first time.
This latest addition to the Gertrude Bell website is the result of a two-year project – ‘Beyond the Margins’, created in collaboration with colleagues in Research Software Engineering and the McCord Centre for Landscape.
It is a geo-spatial interface which aims to provide an immersive visual experience via maps and timelines, of the unique documentary heritage depicting Bell’s life and travels.
Newcastle’s link to Archaeology in the early 20th Century
North East born Gertrude Bell (1868-1926) was an explorer and archaeologist. She travelled and worked extensively across the world, especially in the Middle East.
Following the First World War, she became a pivotal figure in the creation of the Kingdom of Iraq. Her legacy is significant and contested, but her multi-faceted collection is acknowledged as being part of the International Memory of the World.
The Gertrude Bell Archive was gifted to Newcastle University by Bell’s family following her death in 1926.
It has since been a constant source of research, teaching, and engagement and is now primarily accessed through our dedicated website, which first launched over 25 years ago, and now welcomes over 250,000 unique visitors a year (80% of whom are international).
Generous funding from the Harry and Alice Stillman Foundation, totalling close to £300,000 to date, has supported an initial three-year project Gertrude Bell and the Kingdom of Iraq at 100, which led the digitisation and reorganisation of the archive, as well as three exhibitions and the modernisation and relaunch of the website in 2023.
A further gift supported this latest philanthropically funded project, Beyond the Margins: Mapping Gertrude Bell.
A globally accessible archive
The two-year project primarily focused on both the creation of a new map interface for the Gertrude Bell Archive and the geo-tagging of over 11,000 items for inclusion.
Powered by GIS as a discovery tool and with the ability to create bespoke ‘stories’, the archival materials are geo-referenced and can be explored, searched and displayed over satellite imagery, or a selection of historical and topographical maps.
The culmination of the project marks a new milestone in continuous efforts to widen access to the UNESCO Gertrude Bell Archive for an international community, including both expert researchers and first-time users.
If you are interested in the archive or in collaborating with the team in any way, please contact Project Archivist, Valentina Flex
With thanks
We would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Harry and Alice Stillman Foundation, the team at Advancement, and the many diverse collaborators with whom we have worked over the course of this project.
Learn more
Studying Archaeology at Newcastle University - https://www.ncl.ac.uk/hca/about/archaeology/
The fantastic resources available within Newcastle University Library’s Special Collections and Archives - https://www.ncl.ac.uk/library/special-collections/
