Campus Legacies

Project origins

The project was developed in response to the discovery of a receipt in 1889. This receipt evidenced a donation of £500 made by King Leopold II of Belgium to Newcastle University. This donation was part of a fund-raising campaign to build Armstrong College. At the time this was part of the University of Durham, and is now the Armstrong Building, Newcastle University.   

King Leopold II’s regime in the 1800s was responsible for the seizure of land in Central Africa and the creation of the Congo Free State in 1885. Under his regime, 10 million Africans were murdered in the Congo and many more were mutilated as part of the cultivation and trade of rubber, ivory and minerals.  

Two Postgraduate Researchers, Holly Middleton-Spencer and Thomas Flynn originally discovered the receipt during archival research for a 150- year celebration of Maths and Physical Sciences at Newcastle University.  

Further archival research, undertaken by Dr Craig Thomas (a PhD researcher at Newcastle at the time), attempted to uncover a wider context behind the donation. The research tried to understand why King Leopold II had given this amount of money over to Newcastle University in the first place. The only other UK institution known to have received a similar donation from King Leopold II was the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine.   

You can download a copy of this King Leopold II Donation Report (PDF: 147KB)

Project aims and activities

The Campus Legacies project aims to:

• further research, understand, and contextualise this donation in terms of Newcastle University’s own heritage
• understand how it impacts the student and staff community at Newcastle University, as well as other communities across the North East

The project started in 2022. This was when the Centre for Heritage was first made aware of the connections between the Armstrong Building and King Leopold II of Belgium.

Professor Annie Tindley (Black History Month group) joined the project team in 2023. Along with our two research assistants, Heather Proctor and Jemima Kimvula, Professor Tindley has taken the lead in carrying out further archival research. This research considers the connections between King Leopold II, Newcastle University, and the city of Newcastle.

Since the project started, we have carried out three workshops involving:

• stakeholders from across the University
• external experts with specialisms in decolonising, anti-racist work, and who have led on similar projects at other universities elsewhere

Three Postgraduate researchers (Heather Proctor, Muhammed Topdas and Samantha Vaughn) also carried out a separate piece of work, funded by the Centre for Heritage. This work looked at the impact that knowledge of the donation had on international students at Newcastle.

Read our latest report (PDF: 443KB) (co-authored by Annie Tindley, Loes Veldpaus, Heather Proctor and Jemima Kimvula) which includes recommendations for taking this work forward.

This report outlines the connections between King Leopold II of Belgium and the local authority of Newcastle upon Tyne. It sheds further light on why the donation was made in the first place. It also makes a series of recommendations to Newcastle University about the next steps that we feel should be taken to help us address this past. Finally, it highlights the links with Durham University, and the need for a collaborative approach to this work.

Collaborate with us

We are looking to work with communities:

• within the University
• across Newcastle upon Tyne
• the wider NE region

We'd like to get feedback on these recommendations to help us think about how we might address the injustices of the past. We're also interested in incorporating this aspect of our heritage into the social justice work at Newcastle University.

We are particularly interested in continuing to work with people from the Global Majority and the local Congolese community as we think about the next phase of this project.

If you are interested in discussing this with us, please get in touch with Annie Tindley on annie.tindley@newcastle.ac.uk