A Moving Story - What We Did In September
Another busy month at Cheshire Archives – this time across two buildings! Since getting the keys to our new Chester centre last month, we’ve started working there to get it ready for opening early next year. Recruitment is now complete, with archives assistants appointed for both Chester and Crewe. We’re looking forward to welcoming five new colleagues to help run the two searchrooms.
Over in Crewe, final touches are being made to the building before handover in November. Having seen Chester, we now understand how images translate to the scale of the available surfaces telling Crewe's stories. We've been choosing old favourites as new wallpaper for walls and doors.
The specialist removers begin work in October. It’s still all hands on deck to finish barcoding the contents of our seven strongrooms, but the end is in sight – by the end of September we’d completed 91%, meaning we’ve recorded the references of 214,008 individual items in 25,062 containers across 704 bays of shelving. The new single strongroom in Chester contains about three kilometres of shelving, so we have plenty to fill it!
Some interesting items have cropped up over the past month. Caroline came across an 1875 map of St Oswald's ward in Chester with blocks of colour on it. It’s missing a key to the colours, but it could represent proposed clearance of slum housing known as the Chester Courts. Many were demolished for public health reasons, but also for commercial redevelopment. The blocks are by a new road that was built around that time, nowadays the A56 and Hoole Way roundabout (not far from our new building) - but if you have any other ideas we'd love to know.
Joy has been improving catalogue listing for a legal firm’s collection and came across an 1813 invoice from a Chester tailor, or ‘habit maker’. It includes making a suit of livery and materials, with a charge of three pounds and sixpence for five and a half yards of fine blue cloth, two shillings for best pearl buttons and a shilling for mending a pair of pantaloons.
As well as packing up the old conservation studio, our conservation team is busy making bespoke packaging to move fragile items, including plates – souvenir plates from Foden's, copper printing plates and ... coffin plates. We also have to plan moving framed art. Hannah and Michael had to work around a very large, framed photograph of a garden – which was in fact a roof garden, above the old Browns of Chester department store.
Chloe is now arranging pilot sessions of the Key Stage 2 learning programme before we officially open. Children will be getting a sneak preview of the new building as well as a Crime and Punishment mystery to solve. Katie is putting the finishing touches to our new volunteer programme and will start welcoming back our existing volunteers soon, and Anya has been working on the numerous oral histories we’ve collected over the past year during community engagement work. From reviewing transcripts and creating summaries, to collating the images and materials that have been shared with us, she’s getting them ready for cataloguing so they’ll be available for the future.
This is only a fraction of all the work that’s been going on behind the scenes. Look out for next month’s update when the collections removal will be well underway!
By Hannah Bate, Archives Assistant
