The Box

Key details

Date of development: 2020
Cost: £47 million
Who funded it: National Lottery Heritage Fund (NLHF) and Plymouth City Council (PCC), Arts Council England and several trusts and foundations.

Case study themes

Service sustainability, community engagement, accessibility

Project summary

The Box is a museum, art gallery and archive located in the centre of Plymouth. Its collections of more than 2 million items include social & natural history, artworks, archives, photographic and film collections. They were previously held by separate organisations who developed a partnership to revolutionise how the city cared for, shared and enjoyed its heritage.

The project refurbished and redesigned a series of existing buildings. The City Museum & Art Gallery, Central Library and St Luke’s Church are now connected by newly built extensions. This has created thirteen galleries and exhibition spaces, strongrooms, learning and research facilities, a kitchen/bar and shop as well as a brand new public square.

The service achieved full Archive Accreditation in 2022 for both the archive and film collections.

Challenges and opportunities

The buildings housing Plymouth’s archive collections were no longer fit for purpose. The Plymouth and West Devon Record Office, South West Image Bank and the South West Film and TV Archive were struggling to maintain stable environmental conditions in which to store their collections. This meant Plymouth and West Devon Record Office’s Place of Deposit status was at risk.

Funding for the heritage sector was changing. There was a risk that the funding model the South West Film and TV Archive (SWFTA) and the South West Image Bank were using would become obsolete which would put their future in danger.

The new building would bring together a range of collections with different storage needs. As the collections teams started to share their various specialisms, they realised that they needed some outside guidance to design the strongrooms.

The collections included paper, film, photographs, artworks and museum objects made from almost any material imaginable. All these items needed to be stored in different ways with different environmental conditions. They worked with the National Conservation Service to design a series of environmentally controlled stores for archives and museum collections, and a ‘freezer’ store for specialist media such as film.

A key outcome of the project was the strengthening of external partnerships and relationships that had been essential to the strategic focus of the archives. This notably included the British Film Institute, which had for many years provided core and project funding for the film archive (as SWFTA).

The coming together of organisations through the project enabled us to build greater capacity to deliver on the audience and engagement targets of these funded programmes, for example the Unlocking Film Heritage project (2015-2018) resulting in the BFIPlayer, the Tape Digitisation project (2018-2022) resulting in the BFIReplay platform, and now the Reimagining the Film Archive programme (2023-2026).

Established partnerships with local agencies were also taken forward through the project including with Plymouth University (which saw the design and development of the MA in Archival Practice), Pen Arts/Plymouth Arts Cinema (which enabled us to continue with the annual SWFTA film commission) and with regional partners such as the Film Audience Network SW, the UK Film Archive Network and Archives SW.

Outcomes

The Box is a social space for art, people, ideas and experiences. Creating a new partnership to deliver an integrated museum, gallery and archive service from The Box provided an opportunity for the staff to think differently about their work. They questioned who had decided what to collect and how this affected the stories they could tell. They challenged traditional approaches of looking at collections first and instead focused on the people who created them. This led to a new way of working that connects communities with collections by recognising that archives, artworks or museum objects only exist because of people.

The team also adopted a broader approach to thinking across professional skills. They now bring their individual specialisms into a collaborative way of working, whether in archives, film, artworks or objects.

The creation of the new partnership was an opportunity to rethink how different audiences engage with the archive collections. The Box combines galleries, exhibition spaces and digital interactive displays with areas for community engagement. There is a Media Lab gallery where a curated selection of film archives is available for public viewing and the Active Archives Gallery which enables audiences to engage more dynamically to items from archive and with stories that resonate with community identities.

Visitors need to book if they wish to view archives or books. They can access these in the Cottonian Research Room, which also has dedicated terminals for viewing film collections. This has allowed The Box to keep its Place of Deposit status.

What did you learn from the process?

The main issue faced by the project was the time constraint in packing and moving multiple collections from separate source locations in 12 months.

Don’t wait for the perfect opportunity. For example, some collections had to be put into temporary storage. Whilst this was not perfect, it improved the conditions in which they were kept until the new strongrooms were built. Making a compromise was the first step to better collections care.

Working in challenging circumstances is hard but it is a great way to build confidence and increase your appetite for risk taking. The building work took place before and during the Covid-19 pandemic which meant everyone had to work differently. At the same time, the arts and heritage services were being restructured. The team focused on becoming resilient. This was helped by the fact that the project had strong support across all political parties on the city council. Knowing that everyone was working towards the same goal kept the team going.

What is one piece of advice you would give others in a similar position?

Be ambitious and have a vision, don’t be afraid of change. Things will keep changing so think about how you can respond to this. Also, look out for opportunities to invest in workforce development during major capital projects.

Developing skills through Continuing Professional Development (CPD) and sharing learning can be helpful. The Archivist responsible for the film archive collections recently completed an accredited copyright and licensing certification and is now sharing the learning from that across the service ensuring a resilient workforce when working with creative commissions and commercial reproductions. Staff have also completed carbon literacy training through the Carbon Literacy Trust and there have been training sessions on anti-racism, digital engagement and AI.

Using standards is a good way to help your service evolve. For example, Archive Service Accreditation Standard was used as the benchmark for the design of both physical and digital storage. The Standard helped with the specification of strongrooms which needed to store a range of different and vulnerable materials. The Standard continues to be used to help shape the service. For example, its recent update, with a focus on environmental sustainability and equality, diversity and inclusion is now part of the current ‘Reimagining the Film Archive’ project.

Similarly, because the film archive had experience of using the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) standard, it was easier to apply the same approach to archives and collections held as part of the Plymouth and West Devon Record Office and the Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery, and helped shape the design of a single service digital preservation infrastructure for the benefit of all collection areas.

How will this work be developed in the future?

The team at the Box are continuing to work in a reflective and joined up way with input from colleagues across the service – the ‘Reimagining the Film Archive’ project is a good example of this. Its aim is to make the film archive collections more socially and environmentally sustainable.

A wider group of people are now exploring the film collections through a social lens, so that collections become more connected with communities. Using volunteers to investigate collections has also been a good way to create new narratives, ensuring collections are better researched, understood and usable in future public exhibitions and displays. Through artist and research commissions, under-represented narratives are being unearthed that resonate with pressing issues of the day.

Each piece of work undertaken also considers the carbon footprint of media archive. The storage of film archives uses a lot of energy, whether the original film in a cold strongroom or a digitised copy on a server. The project is creating a space to ask questions about how to balance the storage of fragile materials with efforts to address climate change.

Find out more

Visit The Box’s website