Qualla: Royal Geographical Society

Royal Geographical Society: Introduction

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AlexD, CC BY-SA 3.0. Shackleton's Burberry helmet is in a cabinet in South Kensington. So are the oxygen sets carried up Everest, Inuit boots from the Canadian Arctic, ceremonial leopard's claws from the colonial Congo, and David Livingstone's account of his search for the source of the Nile. There is a map printed in 1482. There are 40 globes, 3,000 atlases, a million sheets of maps and charts. The Royal Geographical Society is what happens when a learned society of explorers, founded as a dining club in 1830, collects its own correspondence for nearly two centuries.

Image: AlexD | CC BY-SA 3.0

Royal Geographical Society: A Dining Club That Mapped the World

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Shaibalahmar, CC BY-SA 3.0. The society began the way many great Victorian institutions began: with seven men over dinner, talking about geography. The founding members in 1830 were Sir John Barrow, the Admiralty's geographer; Roderick Murchison, the geologist who would name the Silurian system; Robert Brow...

Image: Shaibalahmar | CC BY-SA 3.0

Royal Geographical Society: Lowther Lodge, and the Lifting of a Ban

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. After several moves the society found its permanent home in 1913, when it purchased Lowther Lodge in Kensington Gore for £100,000. The building had been designed in 1874 by Norman Shaw, one of the great domestic architects of the Victorian age. The same year the society moved in,...

Image: Public domain

Royal Geographical Society: Two Million Documents, Five Hundred Years

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Palestine Association (1805), Public domain. The collection spans five centuries of geography. There is a 19th-century guidebook to Berlin. There are 4,500 expedition reports, a database of 8,500 expeditions stretching to the present. There are over half a million photographs and lantern slides, from Herbert Ponting's photo...

Image: Palestine Association (1805) | Public domain

Royal Geographical Society: Medals and the Awkward Past

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit William Watts McNair, Public domain. King William IV established the medals in 1831 with a gift of fifty guineas a year, "to constitute a premium for the encouragement and promotion of geographical science and discovery." In 1839 the society converted it into two gold medals - the Founder's and the Patron's. The rec...

Image: William Watts McNair | Public domain

Royal Geographical Society: Geography Made Visible at 30,000 Feet

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Press2014, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 2010 the society launched Hidden Journeys, a project that curates geography along popular flight paths - London to Johannesburg, Sydney to Singapore, Madrid to Rio. By 2013 the work had moved into the seatbacks: Singapore Airlines partnered with the project on its new Boeing 7...

Image: Press2014 | CC BY-SA 4.0