Thomas Cook archive secured
AN ARCHIVE of Thomas Cook business and travel history is to be preserved and secured for the future in the county.
The Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland has been selected as the new permanent home of the Thomas Cook archive collection.
Thomas Cook founded his travel company in Leicester and ran his first excursion from there to Loughborough in 1841. The company grew rapidly and by 1855 was running continental tours, opening a London office in 1865.
Thomas Cook is credited with inventing the package tour and bringing affordable travel to ordinary people. In 1878, Cook himself retired to Leicester, where he died in 1892.
The company he founded became a household name with global reach. It finally ceased trading in September 2019 and a permanent home was sought for its archive.
The Record Office, run by Leicestershire County Council in partnership with Leicester City Council and Rutland County Council, was awarded the honour of housing the nationally and internationally significant collection following a bidding process organised by the Business Archives Council and Crisis Management Team for business archives in liaison with the Official Receiver.
The entire Thomas Cook archive, which encompasses records from the earliest days of package travel right up to the modern day, is now being transferred to the Record Office in Wigston.
The huge collection is made up of thousands of individual items, including minute books and staff records, posters, travel guides and timetables. It also features 60,000 photographic images and souvenirs from Thomas Cook’s 178-year history, including glass and china, uniforms through the ages and even a model of a Nile steamer.
The archive will be the single largest collection at the Record Office, which has six miles of shelving representing 1,000 years of the history of Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland.
The Thomas Cook collection will be thoroughly catalogued by Record Office staff, before being made available to the public.