How do you move over 250,000 museum objects, 350,000 library books and nearly 1,000 archives from one side of London to the other, when the V&A has never attempted such a feat before? The short answer is that you plan the project to mind-boggling levels of detail, involve almost all areas of the museum in the effort, engage an amazing community of staff and volunteers, select the best external partners and consume a LOT of tea and biscuits (more of which later).
With all items now transported from Blythe House – the Grade II listed building near London Olympia that we’ve long shared with the British Museum and Science Museum – to V&A East Storehouse in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, it’s perhaps a good moment to reflect on this momentous achievement.
The early phases of the project – known as the Blythe House Decant to us – focused on the barcoding (around 500,000 applied) and digitisation (over 140,000 photographs taken) of our collections and archives. We made the majority of these images immediately available to the public via Explore the Collections, a significant step in digitising our collections, before a single object was moved.
The above exercise involved working systematically through all the V&A’s collections and archives, an unprecedented but fascinating process which enabled many other important activities to take place. All items were checked for hazards and their physical condition assessed – important considerations in what is safe to make available to the public – and thousands of documentation improvements made.
9,936 items received conservation treatments to make them safe to travel, involving our specialist teams for books, ceramics, glass, furniture, metals, paintings, paper, sculpture, stained glass and textiles.
In other cases it represented a timely opportunity to create better long term storage solutions, such as the wonderful work in rehousing our Japanese lacquered objects and the fabrication of hundreds of bespoke shoe trays.
The subsequent packing phase was daunting in terms of variety, complexity and sheer volume. Numbers alone can’t really convey the hard work and ingenuity of the Decant team, now expanded to include our transportation partners Constantine and Ede’s, but they perhaps give a flavour.
A small selection from the collections side of the project: 3,500 pair of shoes, 6,271 drawers of textiles and clothing, 5,476 items of hanging dress, 1500 chairs, 1600 paintings, 686 puppets, 217 ceramic teapots and 799 biscuits tins were all meticulously packed for transportation.
Things were no less challenging on the archives moves, with nearly 80,000 items to process including Eduardo Paolozzi’s extraordinary Krazy Kat Arkive of Twentieth Century Popular Culture, and archives as diverse as those of the late designer Kenneth Grange, musician PJ Harvey and the Glastonbury Festival. This in addition to the staggering 350,000 volumes in the library move.
As the packing marathon neared completion, it was time for the first truck to pull away from Blythe House’s loading bay. Over the course of the collections transportation phase 579 journeys were made covering some 10,000 road miles – with a similar story for the archives moves. This required an almost incalculable number of trips in the building’s aging goods lift, which had to be shared with the two other museums.
Like many areas of Blythe House, the goods lift has been popular with film and TV location scouts over the years. But while it could comfortably accommodate Benedict Cumberbatch (he emerges from it in 2011’s ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’) our very largest rolled textiles just wouldn’t fit. No problem, we simply remove an upper-floor window, erect a building-high scaffolding structure and individually hoist each six metre roll down to the waiting truck.
The project was now split across the two sites, with the Storehouse team quickly sensing the potential of their new surroundings. The building, situated within the Olympic Park’s Here East campus, was designed from scratch as a state-of-the-art museum store that will allow unprecedented levels of public access while ensuring the best long-term care for our collections, archives and books. It’s also an extraordinary place to work.
While it includes many innovative features for the storage, handing and viewing of objects and archives – not least a giant vertical carousel for the above-mentioned rolled textiles – it was also important that tried and tested storage solutions from Blythe House weren’t simply discarded. The removal, transportation and reuse of over 19,633 cabinets, plan chests, trays and other storage units represents an important commitment to the continuity and sustainability of collections and archives care.
But regardless of whether each storage location was new or reused, it needed to be identified by its own QR code, an exercise largely carried out by a team of incredibly dedicated volunteers. 63,123 labels later, the job was done.
So began the mammoth task of unloading, unpacking and installing the former contents of Blythe House. Sometimes this was the reverse of the packing process, with the items returning to similar, or even the original, storage. No easy task with the delicacy and complexity of many of our objects and with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of new items arriving daily on every truck.
But in many cases the installations involved a radically different approach to the former storage regime at Blythe. Central to the Storehouse design is the open shelving (or Adjustable Pallet Racking in storage-speak) that will make large swathes of the collections immediately visible to visitors. Many technical challenges were posed, all were resolved with ingenuity, teamwork and good-humour.
The arrival at Storehouse of the very last truck was an exciting and emotional day for everyone at both sites. Finally everything had moved East and the final checks, strip-out and handover activities at Blythe could begin.
It also meant that an empty Blythe House could now host a farewell party for us all to say goodbye to the old place. Speeches were made, glasses were raised, tears were shed, hastily-assembled team photos were taken (we should maybe have had the actual building in the background?).
The Decant has been a project rich in statistics – and this short blog post has barely scratched the surface – but we neglected to measure a couple of important ones as we went along. Rigorous calculations can now reveal that an estimated 150,000 cups of tea were drunk over the course of the project and some 500,000 biscuits consumed. Fittingly, if laid end to end, the latter would stretch the distance from Blythe House to Storehouse.
On a personal note, I joined the Decant effort as a volunteer back in 2017 after a career delivering non-museum projects, and have never worked with such an inclusive, creative, generous and hard-working group of people, who’ve made the most extraordinary achievements seem almost routine. As the project finally draws to a close, it’s been a genuinely moving experience for all involved.
