In remembrance of our colleague, Rachel Cosgrave, Senior Archivist at Lambeth Palace Library from 2003 – 2024, we will install a memorial bench in the garden of Lambeth Palace, a place that Rachel loved.
Rachel joined Lambeth Palace Library in 2003 after a period working at King’s College London and surveying the collections of SOAS, UCL and the Royal Society of Anaesthetists. After winning the University of Liverpool’s Myers Prize for best academic performance in archive studies in 1995/6, Rachel went on to study for a doctorate examining communities in the east Cheshire Pennines from the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries.
At Lambeth, Rachel quickly made her mark, taking on leadership of the archives team not long after she joined. Her contribution to the Library cannot be overestimated. Rachel oversaw a transformative period for access to Lambeth’s archives and manuscripts by leading the mammoth project to retro-convert over 40,000 catalogue pages for inclusion in the Library’s newly-acquired online catalogue. Negotiating substantial acquisitions and leading the Archives team through extensive cataloguing projects, focusing in particular on opening up the papers of successive archbishops, Rachel developed the holdings to become the broad and accessible collection it is today. More recently, the Library could not have accomplished its 2020 move into new premises, and the successful union of the teams at Lambeth and the Church of England Record Centre, without her tenacity, logic and humour.
If you would like to remember Rachel through contributing to the bench and memorial plaque, please use the link on this page. Any additional funds raised will be donated to Mind, one of the leading mental health charities in the UK. You can find out more about the work of Mind on their website: https://www.mind.org.uk.