A Moving Story - What We Did In June
We’re half way through the year and making great progress on our 2026 To Do list for our forthcoming move.
Our Community Engagement team have ticked off several items in June. Anya is immersed in Speak Your Language: Sharing Stories, Learning English — an initiative to develop reading resources inspired by local heritage for ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) learners. We’re keen to speak with local ESOL and other relevant groups to explore themes, stories and content - so if you’re interested in helping to shape these resources, we’d love to hear from you.
Hannah put the finishing touches to our new Let’s Talk, History audio trail, with recording duties taken care of by Becky and Heather. Our technical duo also created a stop-motion animation about preparing our book collection for the move, inspired by the new Toy Story film – find it on Facebook and Instagram!
Barcoding continues apace – we’ve now scanned 16,855 containers in 475 strongroom bays, with a total of 149,121 items listed for the new locations database that our Research Consultant Brett is building. That’s 60% of everything we have at Duke Street - great progress, especially as soaring temperatures kept us away from our barcode scanners for part of the month.
The strongroom work continues to generate tasks for our Archivists. Caroline has been improving collections information on documents related to the Runcorn-Widnes Transporter Bridge. From technical drawings dating back to 1901 to compulsory purchase orders from the 1920s, the Borough Surveyor and Engineers file will be available to view in our Archive Research Room when we reopen. Becky has worked on some Warrington Corporation documents, with previously unseen photographs of South Warrington dating from the 1920s and 1930s being a particular highlight.
Archivist Adam has been finishing a series of guides to support researchers using the new archive. They’ll be organised around two key themes: people and place. Want to know where your ancestor went to school? There’s a guide for that. Curious about tracing the history of your house? There’s a guide for that too! There will be 17 guides in total to help you get started.
Work continues on our new catalogue, with the Gems team finishing our first batch of 1,000 Gems that cover 22 Cheshire locations, with more to come. And speaking of interesting images, artwork for the public areas of our new centre in Chester has now been selected and sent for printing. The designs are a collage of some of the most striking items from our collections and are over two metres tall!
Our Volunteer Officer Katie is exploring how other archive services manage their volunteer programmes, as we prepare to welcome volunteers to a range of roles in our new centres, and Learning Officer Chloe delivered another school’s local history session at Little Sutton library. Students look part in a carousel of activities, exploring trade directories, identifying local industries, and even debating the most dangerous aspects of navvies’ jobs!
One of the tasks our Local Studies Librarian tackled was sorting through our collection of vintage telephone directories, the oldest dating back to 1956, including the iconic Yellow Pages. Like the trade directories in our collection which date back to the 19th century, the Yellow Pages listed local businesses by category, alongside advertisements.
The whole team was treated to an update of the 20,000 Women zine project by lead artist Cath Campbell, where we were able to look at some of the amazing zines created in recent workshops.
Finally, Conservation have been as busy as ever. Angela has made yet another measuring template – this time for items currently held in our plan chests, such as the Sunday School Cradle Roll pictured below. Whilst repackaging some Chester Cathedral records some lovely watercolours of cathedral interiors caught our eye, and of course re-packaging is ongoing, with Rachel removing polyester sleeves from some parchment maps to protect the inks, making bespoke folders for them instead.
That’s just a snapshot of the many things we’ve been doing in June. We’re expecting to get the keys to our new Chester building very soon, so our team will start getting to know the new spaces and make sure everything is ready before we welcome you in!
