The Moving Blog

With our packaging work forging ahead (more on that in a future post) we're now able to begin organising our collections for the smoothest move possible in the new year. As viewers of our Store Tours series will know, some of our collections are spread across multiple strongrooms in order to make best use of the space available, but in our new store at The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery we'll be able to have everything laid out together and in reference number sequence too - lovely stuff! However, to avoid both re-locating and re-organising our archive material at the same time (🤯) we've decided to use the modern racking in our basement strongrooms to help get everything in order in advance.

Our first task has been to create a buffer of clear space in store "B" so that we can rearrange the shelves to mimic the storage setup we'll be moving into. This has involved temporarily relocating some archive material into the adjacent store "C", but as this strongroom is also pretty full we've utilised some of the pallets left over from our many archive box deliveries as a temporary storage platform - from empty boxes to full ones! Having made this space, the plan is to now fill the shelves in "B" in sequence, slotting items in from our other strongrooms where necessary. All this work helps bring our archive material together, primes it for the move across to the museum, and means we can further rationalise our collections storage to save even more space... perfect for all the new accessions we're looking forward to receiving in the future!

All this movement of material - temporarily between our two basement stores and more permanently from our third floor strongroom to our new shelving sequence - will make accessing certain collections in the lead up to the move very difficult, and the material affected will also change on a regular basis too. Although we'll be keeping track of all these changes we'd rather not disturb things any more than is necessary, so in the very near future we'll also be announcing a small change to our current status which will narrow the scope of our remote enquiry service slightly.