This collection contains correspondence of Sir Austen Henry and Lady Enid Layard and Charlotte Maria Guest between 1869 and 1884. One series mainly comprises the correspondence of Enid Layard with her sister Charlotte Maria Guest and a smaller number from Sir Austen Henry Layard to Charlotte Maria Guest. A second series comprises a file of letters from members of the Du Cane family, including letters written by Alicia Marie Du Cane while staying with the Layards in Constantinople. Much of the material relates to Layard and the custodianship of his collection. There is also some published material relating to Layard, photographs of the Layard family, and some associated family and biographical material including objects and artefacts.

Papers of Max Roberts Creative Director of Live Theatre from 1986 to 2017 include his personal collection of Live Theatre documents including play scripts, photographs, correspondence, papers related to the grow and development of the Theatre at their Quayside location, as well as a substantial collection of leaflets and posters from Live Theatre performances.

The Local Illustrations date from the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries and depict a variety of local scenes and structures, such as schools, hospitals, residences, castles and churches. There are views of Newcastle, Durham, Northumberland, Sunderland; portraits; depictions of local life (keelmen playing cards) and a plan of the Grainger Market, Newcastle.

The collection consists of Herbert Loebl's business and personal records.

The business records contain group papers, sales and marketing files, finance files and general correspondence files for the following engineering and knowledge transfer enterprises with which Herbert Loebl was involved in his lifetime:

The collection also contains a number of annotated scrapbooks which trace the history of Loebl's engineering enterprises through photographs, newspaper cuttings and other ephemera.

Herbert Loebl's academic collection contains his early student notebooks from his degree studies in Electrical Engineering, and notes and source material for his subsequent doctoral thesis and Jewish history research. The collection also includes his certificates and various degree ceremony photographs.

Herbert Loebl received various awards during his lifetime and his personal collection includes photographs, newspaper clippings, scrapbooks, and letters of congratulations regarding his many honours.

The personal papers of local poet Barry MacSweeney (1948-2000), who was an important figure in the Modern Poetry Revival, include manuscripts and published works, correspondence, literature reviews, poetry publications, photographs and newspapers articles.The correspondence includes a range of MacSweeney's friends, fellow poets and family including material from Clive Bush, Pete Bland, Tim Fletcher, Nicholas Johnson, Jackie Litherland, Maggie O'Sullivan, Eric Mottram, Elaine Randall, Jeremy Prynne and Chris Torrence.

Contains of 2 albums of letters, including some by people of local significance like Thomas Bewick, Richard Grainger, George Stephenson, George Otto Trevelyan, Robert Spence Watson and Joseph Swan and others written by such household names as A.E. Houseman, Horatio Nelson, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, William Wilberforce, Michael Faraday, William Ewart Gladstone, Thomas Carlyle, Walter Besant, Mary Shelley, Charles Babington, Garibaldi, Victor Hugo, Ellen Terry and Robert Southey. Other letters include a request for an address to facilitate the delivery of a bear skin from David Walton (1859), an account of the pranks of the 'Borrowlow Bogle' from J. Arkle (1856), the refusal to grant Madame de Bury's request that an officer in the Indian Army be promoted by Richard Airey (1860), a description of his house in China by James Bruce Elgin (1860) and a discussion of French politics and her newly-married life in the country by Frances [i.e. Fanny] Burney (1792).

Personal papers of Jack Mapanje including correspondence, press cuttings, books and draft manuscripts relating to his time as a political prisoner in Malawi, the campaign for his release and the publication of his poetry.

There are over 150 maps in Special Collections. In the main, they are pre-twentieth century and cover areas in north-eastern England.

The Mediaeval Manuscripts number just nine but include Petrus Lombardus' Sententi

The Miscellaneous Manuscripts include some local history material, particularly relating to nineteenth-century bonds and deeds and to the coal trade as well as A collection of recipes, compiled in the years 1684-5; agriculturalist Robert Bakewell's Letters to George Culley, 1786-1792; eighteenth-century household account books; manuscript letters from Henry Liddell on the 1715 Jacobite Rebellion; early twentieth-century National Service League memoranda; An alphabetical list of members of the Northumberland Militia enrolled between 1809 and 1813, giving their full names, places of residence, trades, ages, dates of enrolment, and parishes for which installed; a fair copy of poems by Mary Coleridge, bound in vellum, which she made for a friend in 1891 and which was later published as Fancy's Following; worksheets, correspondence, typescripts and a postcard relating to Tony Harrison's Newcastle is Peru and letters from Sean O'Casey to the People's Theatre, Newcastle.