The Moving Blog

Now 2024 is here we're delighted to be able to write that Stoke-on-Trent City Archives will be reopening at The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery this year! We'd like to thank all our customers and depositors for their great patience and support so far, and we look forward to welcoming you to our new Reading Room when it opens in the spring. However, being in a new parent building means that we need to adjust our new opening hours to better fit with those of the museum. For reference, our previous standard timetable looked like this:

Our new Reading Room will open Wednesday to Friday, and on the first Saturday of each month. This averages out at just under 22 hours per week, and also offers our customers longer days in which to access our collections. This new timetable will work as follows:

Some Opening Hours FAQs

Why are you proposing to move away from being open every Saturday to only once a month?

Saturday openings are difficult to get right and we debated the pros and cons of opening just one long Saturday instead of four short Saturdays. Overall, we concluded that:

• Saturdays were generally our quietest day pre-lockdown.
• It opens up the possibility of holding events in our reading room on the Saturdays we're not open for research.
• Visitors coming from outside the area will be able to have a longer research period over the whole week, Wednesday to Saturday.

Will closing earlier on a Wednesday evening impact those who want a longer research day?

Previously, we opened at 9:30am and closed at 6pm on a Wednesday. The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery opens at 10am and closes at 5pm, so yes, we will no longer be able to open until 6pm on a Wednesday. However, we've made our opening hours on Thursdays and Fridays significantly longer, and we've also made our Saturday opening a whole day for those who can't visit during normal office hours.