Ruskin College, founded in central Oxford in 1899, has recently sold its main Walton Street building to Exeter College and has moved to the outskirts of the city at Headington. This has been seen as an opportunity, by some, to ditch the College’s past both literally and metaphorically. The College was a repository of lived experience of the trade union and labour movement of the twentieth century and its records complemented that. Much material from Ruskin’s past has already been physically trashed. This includes admission records of some of the trade union students who attended Ruskin in its first decades. These were activists, sponsored by their unions, who usually went back into the trade union and labour movement as leaders.