Progress with the move of Archives to FCH!

13th May 2025

Packed up and ready to move

Members of the university and frequent visitors to our Special Collections and Archives will be aware that the collection is moving from our Hardwick campus to a much larger space in the Teaching (TC) building on FCH campus. There will be a Reading Room in TC002a, along with a room containing the rolling stack for our archival storage and a separate BGAS collection room, as well as exhibition space in the Crush Hall foyer.

We’re now halfway through the task of moving all the archival collections; this colossal project began many months back with library staff undertaking the task of labelling every box according to its Bay and Shelf, creating lists of material to help with the unloading on the other end. This labelling was finished just a week before the start of the moves in which we were assisted by the university’s brilliant contractors, Advanced Moves. The first stage of the move (boxing the material in crates and storing it temporarily) has now been completed in just under 4 days, thanks to the Advanced Moves team and help of the Assistant Librarians. While there’ll be a great deal of unpacking to do on the other end we’re looking forward to our much larger rolling stack and new reading room, along with curating collections to put on display in the foyer. Many cookies and biscuits were had along the way, and we had our last ever visitor on Day 2; a racing pigeon (below) wandered in off the street, after a few office hijinks the pigeon was finally helped out the window and flew away.

Below you can see the scale of the task we’ve been working on this week; nearly 1000 1 meter crates were loaded with books, archival records and artefacts, with crates filling every room and most of the corridor of the Archive building. We’re looking forward to the completion of this task in the summer and arriving in our new home, just next door to the FCH library.