The Geographical Field Group (GFG)

I was directed to search for information about this group after reading a paper by Richard Clarke.

This links to my entry on K C Edwards.

GFG is mentioned in Edwards' papers.

Professor Edwards was keenly committed to the promotion of serious field studies as an important element of undergraduate study. He was for many years the chairman of the Le Play Society's Students' Group, before becoming president of its successor, the Geographical Field Group, after the war. He remained president until his death. He also held the presidency of the Nottingham branch of the Geographical Association. From 1937 to 1958, he was convenor of the Standing Conference of Heads of Geography Departments in British Universities.

His wide geographical knowledge of the East Midlands led to his being released on secondment between 1944 and 1946 as the Regional Research Officer for the newly-established Ministry of Town and Country Planning. In 1956, he launched The East Midlands Geographer and in 1966 he edited Nottingham and its region for the British Association's Nottingham annual meeting of that year. In 1967, Professor Edwards was nominated to the East Midlands Regional Economic Planning Council, and his services to planning and the region were recognised by a CBE in 1970.

As a result of pre-war field studies and doctoral research, Edwards became an authority on the geography of Luxembourg. This experience was used in wartime intelligence. He subsequently initiated and edited the National Atlas of Luxembourg, published in 1971. He was also familiar with Poland through field study and led the first official post-war delegation of university geographers there in 1959. Professor Edwards died in Beeston, Nottinghamshire on 7 May 1982.

The Edwards Resource Centre at the Geography Department is named after him. They also offer Edwards Prizes.

This UoN Blog explores his fieldwork and explains the link above to the name of the university's resource centre.

In the 1930s Nottingham lecturer K.C. (Kenneth Charles) Edwards was ‘in the forefront of those geographers who were actively promoting field studies and making them an integral part of academic training’, developing a range of local and European ‘field camps’. That training – which today might range from learning how to conduct interviews or retrieve archival information, take soil samples or measure water quality – also equips geography graduates for a world of work beyond University research.

Teaching through fieldwork can also help develop an important ethical concern that reaches beyond the processes we might be studying to consider what it means to research and work in a place. Edwards’ local commitment, for example, bore fruit in 1962 in a volume of the New Naturalist series devoted to The Peak District, with contributions on geology from the former head of the Department H.H. Swinnerton. 

 It was also seen outside of the University, where Edwards supported the work of the Ramblers’ Federation and the Youth Hostels Association and assisted the Nottinghamshire Footpaths Preservation Society to plot rights of way on six-inch scale maps

Sources:

https://westminsterresearch.westminster.ac.uk/download/472738d20933a32c722007f440d8429613fe887bf05a8794e65845e7b16534e1/588348/Anteric_Clarke_2009_as_published_version.pdf  

https://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/geography/2019/09/04/coal-cotton-and-the-value-of-local-fieldwork/

https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/geography/about/history.aspx

http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/5234/1/5234.pdf - work in Poland (PDF download)

Edwards was one of several former GA Presidents to contribute a volume to this well known series of books with distinctive colours.


K.C. Edwards (1962) The New Naturalist: The Peak District (London: Collins)