Museum storage facilities are unseen wonders, dark troves of material in little-publicised locations. They might hold 95% or more of an institution’s collections, with some objects as fascinating and beautiful as those on view, others acquired for long-forgotten reasons, destined to languish on obscure shelves. They offer resources for researchers, content for exhibitions, and refreshed permanent displays and refuge to artefacts with nowhere much else to go. They are necessary backup to the workings of a museum. They are the underwater part of the iceberg, the paddling parts of a swan, the dark side of the moon.
Now, three of the country’s most significant reserve collections are being rehoused in new multimillion-pound facilities where, as well as being better cared for, they will be more accessible to the public. This shift has been prompted by a government plan, announced in 2015, to sell Blythe House in west London, an Edwardian baroque office block converted in the 1970s into a store for the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert and the Science Museum. The first of these has moved its objects to a new archaeological research collection in Shinfield, near Reading, and the second to the V&A East Storehouse, a “new kind of museum experience”, which will open next year within the former 2012 Olympics media centre in east London.
The Science Museum Group, which includes significant museums in Manchester, Bradford, York and County Durham as well as the one in London, has built itself the Hawking Building, on a former RAF airfield at Wroughton outside Swindon, Wiltshire – a 545-acre site owned by the museum since 1979. More than 300,000 objects have been moved into the new structure’s 33,000 square metres of floorspace, both from Blythe House and old hangars used for storage elsewhere on the airfield. It is a feat as much of recording and removal as of building, in total taking six years, with an overall project cost of £65m, of which £21m was spent on construction.
Not only is the storage now more organised and in better conditions than before, and served by new conservation laboratories and a photography studio, but the facility also offers new levels of access. It enables external researchers, professional and amateur, more easily to see the Kenwood food mixers or Gartsherrie coal cutters that might be the objects of their fascination. School parties can, for the first time, tour the collections. The general public can book guided tours – if with difficulty, given that the last release sold out in 24 hours.
The building combines the techniques of a distribution centre with the aspirations of a museum. Wanting to achieve the biggest possible building for the available money, says Sian Williams, director of the museum’s One Collection programme, they “looked at what supermarkets do” and commissioned an efficient big shed of the kind that Morrisons or Amazon might build, designed by the Leeds office of GWP Architecture, which has experience of such structures.
At the same time they wanted it to be “more than a typical museum store”, and they asked Sam Jacob Studio, purveyors of enjoyably intelligent and robustly imaginative architecture, to lift the visitor experience above the purely functional. It did not design much by way of new building, apart from a still-under-construction entrance pavilion to the whole ex-airfield site, but its contribution was to devise ways of organising the material, especially the more dramatic items, to heighten their effect, and help people find their way around.
The outcome of the Science Museum’s approach is a bluntly practical exterior, a metal barn coloured in military green so that it might merge with the landscape. Inside it’s a cross between a car boot sale and a mechanically minded pharaoh’s tomb, a wonderland of paraphernalia that extends from a doubledecker Glasgow tramcar of 1901 to an Antarctic-crossing Sno-cat, to a rubber duck whose shape is sufficiently like Jupiter comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko that scientists used it to model the 2014 visit there by the Philae lander. There are thousands of microscopes, more than 180 miner’s lamps and very many typewriters. There’s a 1960s Blue Steel nuclear missile, without warhead, and a graceful 1916 still-working electric car, made by the Detroit Electric Car Company, steered by a tiller rather than a wheel.
As the museum’s curators say, their exhibits can be as valuable for the stories that come with them as for their scientific importance. A preposterously ornate rococo lathe, reputedly used by Frederick the Great of Prussia, stands next to a dirty white pressurised orb – a gondola for a hydrogen balloon in which the Swiss professor Auguste Piccard – the inspiration for Professor Calculus in the Tintin books – travelled in 1932 into the stratosphere. The contents of Stephen Hawking’s office, including his voice synthesiser and such ordinary items as a teabag squeezer, are there, acquired by the museum while the project was under way, which is one reason why the building now carries the great physicist’s name.
The large items are arrayed in a high space as long and slightly less wide than a football pitch, on a floor marked with a grid of white lines tagged with numbers and coloured shapes – a combination, says Sam Jacob, of “a car park and a [painting by] Sol LeWitt”. The objects are arranged, he says, like buildings on city blocks, rising and falling in height and density, with a long, high stack of vehicles along one side. Around this hall are two levels filled with 18 miles of shelving, in long aisles repeating and receding towards infinity, each object tagged with its own barcode. They carry anything from a syringe to a motorbike, efficiently arranged, with less ceremony and more immediacy than in a museum.
The whole is a world away from typical museum design. The presiding spirit is practical, aimed at helping curators do their job. They can now, for example, see more clearly what they have, and can photograph and film items for the benefit of research requests from distant places. Architectural artistry exists mostly as paint on the floor and subtle choices of placement. There are places, for example in an entrance sequence that look a bit cash-strapped, when you could wish for a bit more joy in the built fabric, but on the whole this is a project that has got its priorities right. Thanks to its contents, it is also magnificent.
For details of how to visit the Science and Innovation Park, Wroughton, Swindon, click here.
