I was one of a team of conservators from different specialisms brought in to prepare the V&A’s reserve collection for its move to a new storage facility in East London. When I started as paper conservator in February 2019, it was clear my project was going to be vast and complex. As you can imagine, paper crosses many object types and departments, and initial estimates of the number of items requiring conservation was around 4000, to be completed in 24 months. Of course, no one expected the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and due to working from home and furlough, four months on site were lost. I was the last conservator standing, finishing my part of the project in February 2021.
The Decant project presented a unique opportunity for me to work through collections that up until then had not had the opportunity to be assessed, conserved and rehoused. The main reason these collections had not been assessed and conserved was due to the difficulties of access. The majority of items I worked on for this project were rolled, such as wallpapers, architectural plans and designs. These are particularly tricky items because once rolled up, over time they become brittle and very difficult to unroll without the assistance and intervention from a conservator, so often the best course of preservation is to leave them alone until a conservation project like this can be instigated. They also tend to end up being huge once unrolled! This causes extra complications as there might not be surfaces or even rooms large enough to unroll them enough to see what potential conservation problems might be found.
The rolled items I worked on included wallpaper samples, designs and sketches for stained glass (in charcoal and pastels), and architectural plans, which were a Pandora’s box of issues! I discovered that many of those rolls contained literally hundreds of plans in very poor condition, all bundled together.
Beyond the rolled items there were a variety of other items and object types, each with differing preservation challenges. These collections included wallpaper panels on stretchers, set models, textile and paper mixed media works, works of art on paper (including very large framed works of art), paper on furniture examples and even boxes for crackers. The goal of ‘stable for decant’ always had to be kept in mind, and often using good packaging, rehousing and boxing mitigated many of the problems and will enable future treatments to take place once the items are in their new home.
For the rolled items, many of the conservation problems had arisen because they had been rolled in on themselves and had been crushed either just by the act of gravity over time or the way the rolls had been stacked together. Therefore, it was imperative to roll as many items as possible around supportive archival quality cores after conservation work had been completed. Sometimes just the act of re-rolling mitigated the need for conservation and the Decant archives team were invaluable in helping with rehousing a large quantity of these items after I gave them training and on-going advice and support.
A large number of supportive cores were purchased and cut in house to standard sizes. Depending on the collection, we either rolled individual items or batches together around the supportive cores, wrapped them in archival manila and then added a final Melinex layer to the exterior of the roll, which had a clear printed label with a thumbnail image of the item inside. The collections are now much easier and safer to move around the building and eventually to their new home at the V&A East Storehouse. We can stack and handle them without worrying that further or new damage will occur, plus the collections are much easier to identify and access. However, after improving the individual storage of items, they didn’t always fit back in their original locations.
So, when embarking on a storage project it’s essential to have detailed conversations and plans in place with all stakeholders about how collections might change, where items will fit after rehousing and conservation, how they are going to move, and how they will be accessed in the future. Furthermore, consider if this work will impact on the workflow of other teams, as returning conserved items back to the stores often involved a lot of moving collections around and updating spreadsheets and databases and the time involved wasn’t included in original schedules.
The decant project itself was a challenging and diverse one, with shifting priorities and unexpected complications due to the unforeseen circumstances of a global pandemic. There was much to learn as every day there was a new project or object unlike anything else, and I had to get used to making quick decisions and knowing when to stop and say ‘it’s safe for decant’ even if I could have done more conservation work.
My thanks go to all involved in the Decant project who helped me including the wonderful Archives team, Technical team and Collections Moves team, plus my manager Susan Catcher and the other conservators based at Blythe House and South Kensington.
