Our Projects

As part of Refugee Week, we explored how the Rowntree family (including Mount School Old Scholars), company, and Trusts supported refugees across the twentieth century.

As part of the Joseph Rowntree Centenary, The Rowntree Society undertook a research project to find out what happened at Joseph’s funeral.

In February 2020, we began a new research project exploring the Rowntree company’s historic global supply chains. This project is part of our commitment to expanding the audiences for our work nationally and internationally.

These unique history walks were designed to enable residents and visitors to York to explore key landmarks and places in the city related to Rowntree.

In 2025, we researched and told the story of the trade unions at Rowntree’s in the 1920s.  We did this through the lives of Chief Shop Steward, Fred Hawksby and the Assistant Chief Shop Steward, Irene Pickup. 

A journey through archival photographs, family histories and documentary film, and learn more about the contemporary forms of unfree labour which endure in supply chains across the world.

A fascinating exploration of an untold global history of the Rowntree Company, based on new archival research.

In October 2024, The Rowntree Society was proud to participate in the Historical Perspectives of Homelessness Exhibition. This remarkable event was developed as part of a local history project by Good Organisation (Social Ventures) CIC.

In the summer of 2024, we collaborated with local artist Natalie McKeown, who designed our sculpture for the Trailblazers’ campaign. This effort was part of our initiative to raise the profile of Michael Rowntree, a local leader of good causes.

We held a ‘New Rowntree Histories’ event at Clements Hall as part of the 2022 York Festival of Ideas, which was livestreamed by Pilot Theatre. This event revealed some fascinating, surprising, and thought-provoking stories of Rowntree’s which have not yet been told, using research into understudied areas of the Rowntree archives.

Our volunteer, Laura, has been researching the history of Rowntree’s female employees at the Haxby Road factory in the 20th century, exploring policies and attitudes towards social welfare. This has highlighted fascinating information about the women’s working lives and the issues they faced, some of which are still relevant today.

A project to create innovative digital performances inspired by the mass-observation-style interviews which informed Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree’s seminal 1951 study English Life and Leisure.

Our new blog series explores these questions and many more, drawing on the experiences and lessons of the 1918 ‘Spanish flu’ to expand understanding of the present-day pandemic.

To mark the 30th anniversary of the takeover of Rowntree Mackintosh by Nestlé, The Rowntree Society put on an exhibition of cartoons that appeared in the national newspapers between April and June 1988 during the takeover period.

In 2012 we researched the history of 28 Pavement, the address in York where the Rowntree company began its life in 1828 as grocery business, and where Joseph Rowntree was born in 1836.

In 2013 we received a Heritage Lottery Fund grant for an oral history project called York Remembers Rowntree.

An index of named individuals in the Cocoa Works Magazine, the in-house magazine for workers at the Rowntree factory in York published from 1902 to 1971.

We were delighted in 2015 to be awarded a second grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund (now the National Lottery Heritage Fund) that enabled us to buy a collection of 40 books and pamphlets by Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree in relation to his work in business relations and industrial welfare.

In 2017, we created an exhibition on the life of Lawrence Rowntree for display in the Community Room at York Castle Museum, as part of the museum’s larger commemorative World War One exhibition.

Read about the blue plaques around York that are related to the Rowntree family history.