Middlesex University (Colin McArthur) Collection

Earlier in the year we were delighted to be contacted by Middlesex University, who were generously offering to donate a vast collection of vintage press advertising, known as ‘The Colin McArthur Collection’, to the Trust. A small part of the collection had previously been donated to HAT by former University Archivist Judy Vaknin, back in 2006, and we were over the moon to hear that the rest (some 328 boxes), were now available. 

The collection contains hundreds of thousands of examples of vintage press advertising, ranging in date from the 1880s to the 1970s. Colin McArthur, the creator of the collection, was a former teacher of film studies at Middlesex University and an avid collector of printed advertisements. He ran his collection as a business called 'Half-Brick' which involved the accumulation of vintage press advertisements for a particular company, which were then sold back to that company. 

HAT’s Deputy Director, Alistair Moir said: “We were very excited to receive the offer and are extremely thankful to staff at Middlesex University for keeping the Trust at the forefront of their minds in relation this material. We have been aware of the existence of the larger part of the collection for some time and of its importance in terms of advertising history in the UK. The scope of the material means that it is a nationally, and possibly internationally significant research resource, and we are therefore delighted to finally be able to reunite the two parts at HAT. Thanks to the care that Middlesex have afforded the material, it is in excellent condition, and we will make it available to our onsite researchers as soon as possible. In the longer term we will endeavour to fund a major digitisation project so that the collection can be made available to researchers via our online catalogue.”


A few examples of the content of the collection are below:

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