Bristol Archives

Bristol’s building plans: a conservation challenge    

Project cost:   £18,285
Grant award:  £17,035

Bristol Archives holds an extensive, highly vulnerable set of building plans, dating from 1851 to 1948. They were collected from many local organisations, through Bristol Corporation’s Board of Health remit for monitoring sanitation, and total c40,000 plans bound into 314 very large volumes.  This is one of our most requested collections but also the most difficult to produce for researchers. Although the bindings have ensured the survival of the plans, they have also created a substantial and urgent conservation problem. Some volumes are already too fragile to be handled and had to be withdrawn from public access. 

This project looked at conserving, digitising and re-housing the plans from one volume and to develop methodologies to do so for the rest of the collection – information that could then be used to build a case for large-scale funding.  One particularly complex volume (number 60) from 1911-1912 was chosen as a test sample which contained 363 plans and supporting documents that covered 179 locations within Bristol.  The plans, as in the case of all the other volumes in the collection, had been glued into the volume’s pages in interfolding layers, risking damage with each unfolding.  Extremely brittle tracing paper had shattered, coated fabric plans were very creased and there were tears and losses at the edges of the majority of the paper plans. By employing a pragmatic approach to the conservation, principles and workflows were produced that show how further volumes in the collection could be similarly preserved.      

The project also resulted in the following training benefits:

• The conservators ran a training day for the Archives and Records Association – 20 archivists and conservators as well as Bristol Archive staff learnt about the project, were shown the stores and how the works have been digitised.
• A studio tour for archive students 
• A conference poster was created about the project.
• A small exhibition about the collection and details about the conservation project was installed in the Archives so that visitors could read about the work being undertaken. The display was included in part of the Archives’ annual open day (October 2023) which saw record footfall.

This project has enabled general access to fragile documents which previously we could not share with the public. These now flat conserved plans, can now be properly digitized, allowing users to access these as useful scale drawings as well as beautiful historical documents. Some images will be added to the Know Your Place website for increased access, and all will have enhanced catalogue descriptions as part of a new volunteering project. 

There have been wider benefits: the survey work of the entire Building Plan volumes series, conducted alongside the conservation work, allowed us to better identify which volumes should be restricted for public access. About a third of the volumes (approx. 100) have been marked as ‘unfit for production’. We will put information about the NMCT project on the online catalogue so customers can understand why they cannot view those building plans. The public response has been overwhelmingly positive. Without this project we would have had difficulty explaining why volumes were restricted.

See below for more images, all images courtesy of Bristol Archives.