Summer Internship at Oxford Brookes

This summer, Oxford Brookes will be running a paid internship programme in collaboration with Cambridge University, to gather historical evidence to save paths in Oxford and Cambridge. 

The COVID-19 pandemic and climate change crisis have prompted greater awareness of rights of way and land inequality issues. Now more than ever there is a need for public, community-based research to help decipher land ownership, use, and the rights of the public. In England, public rights of way form a key component of this discussion. Although the government has suggested that the 2026 cut-off date to record historic paths will be removed, no legislation has been passed to make this change and there are still an estimated 49,000 miles of paths that have not been recorded. Some paths could be lost forever if they are not documented and recorded. However doing so requires substantial effort, which, to date, has largely been undertaken by community groups and voluntary organisations. More researchers are needed to find these paths, and submit applications to modify the definitive maps which record them, to ensure the public’s rights are not erased. 

This internship programme will give students the opportunity to undertake public-facing research which has real-world applications. Students will work with the Ramblers’ ‘Don’t Lose Your Way’ project, which encourages work on registering rights of way, to find historic cartographic and documentary evidence to support applications to change the definitive map. Students from Oxford Brooks and Cambridge, will work with one another to help develop a robust methodology on how to uncover evidence for such cases.