Royal Geographical Society

About Royal Geographical Society

British learned society

The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers), often shortened to RGS, is a learned society and professional body for geography based in London. It was founded in 1830 as the Geographical Society of London to promote "the advancement of geographical science", later absorbed the older African Association founded by Sir Joseph Banks in 1788, the Raleigh Club and the Palestine Association, and in 1995 merged with the Institute of British Geographers, the body for academic geographers. It has 16,000 members, reaches the public through publications including The Geographical Journal, published since 1831, research groups and lectures, its fellows use the postnominal FRGS, and it holds the Register of Chartered Geographers. Its headquarters, Lowther Lodge on Kensington Gore near the Royal Albert Hall and Kensington Gardens, is an elegant red-brick Victorian house designed by Norman Shaw in 1874, and at its north-eastern corner stand statues of two of its best-known explorers: Dr David Livingstone, who hoped to end the East African slave trade by finding the source of the Nile, and Sir Ernest Shackleton, who led the "worst journey in the world" across the Southern Ocean to rescue his crew trapped in the Antarctic sea ice; both men died on expeditions. The society has funded many great British expeditions over its history, from the search for the Nile's source to the 1953 Everest expedition. The RGS hosts weekly lectures and gatherings, many free to the public according to Wikivoyage, as well as exhibitions in its modern glass pavilion, and holds vast collections of more than two million maps, photographs and journals available to researchers, including precious records of explorers' travels in Arabia and the Islamic world.

Where:

London, United Kingdom