Mrs Anne Burling
Cleaner, Social and Political Sciences
The Tower, The Old Cavendish Laboratory

“Sometimes when I come up here and look around I wonder what went on and wish that I could go back in time to see.”

Anne Burling has worked as a cleaner at the University since 1985. For 12 years she has worked in The Tower, where much of the early work in atomic physics took place. The work was mostly with radium and there are many stories about the levels of radioactivity left in the building. It was sealed for a number of years until some time in the 1940s when it was cleaned up and used as a storage room. The Tower was considered unfit as an office until the 1970s, when it was cleaned again. It is now part of the Centre for Family Research.