Archives are brought together for keeps

Simon Tait
The Times, 30-8-2014
A sprawling white block nestling in a fold of the Sussex Downs, at first sight “The Keep” lives up to its name: a fortress. But this keep is very much an open stronghold, one that is welcoming upwards of 16,000 visitors a year to see and use the extraordinary archives it houses.

This new bastion near Falmer is a £19m archive centre, a collaboration between East Sussex County Council, Brighton and Hove City Council and the University of Sussex. “We are a keep in the sense of safeguarding, not of excluding anyone or anything,” says the county archivist, Elizabeth Hughes. “We are very much a public resource”.

All three institutions have consigned their historic material to The Keep, which is the centralisation of eight different collections, and it has taken nine years to plan.

The collections remain the responsibility of the different institutions, but for the public’s purposes they are integrated, with a single retrieval system especially developed for The Keep.

The collections date back to 1101 with charters such as that of Battle Abbey, built on the site of the Battle of Hastings, of about 1140. A goldmine for family history explorers are the parish and church records from 1538, giving details of births, marriages and deaths.

There is a strange little object in a small pot which turns out to be Gundrada’s Tooth, filched in the mid-19th century from the coffin of the 11th century wife of William de Warenne, Earl of Surrey, when it had been unearthed in Lewes. It is here as an archive rather than in a museum as an object because it arrived accompanied by a document, which is the letter from the person who took it from the coffin confessing their crime and consigning their booty to posterity.

There is an unrivalled group of early maps, so detailed even the sheep grazing in a 17th century chart appear to be portraits. One of 18th century Brighthelmstone shows the lay-out of the individually held arable strips, known in Sussex dialect as “laines”, which explains the symmetry of Brighton’s modern system of roads some of which are still called laines.

Early books to be found include a late 15th century Caxton imprint of Ranulph Higden’s 14th century Polychronicon, his history of the world as it was then perceived. And the medical encyclopaedia of Ambrose Parey of the 1670s in which the chirurgeon explains, in graphic illustrated detail, the treatment of wounds, and shows a mixture of mythical creatures and actual monstrosities, or “monsters caused by the defect of seed”.

There is the photographic record of the village of Telscombe by the horse trainer Ambrose Goreham, who trained the 1902 Grand National winner, Shannon Lass, there, with every villager captured and identified. And Charles I’s coded letter of 1646 to John Ashburnham in Paris in which he asks for the news to be passed to his queen, Henrietta Maria, that his cause was lost.

The university brings the Bloomsbury Archives, including the Monks House Papers that document Virginia Woolf’s whole career as well as her correspondence with the likes of T S Eliot, Noel Coward and Katherine Mansfield. In the Archives of Rudyard Kipling are the author’s own exquisite drawings made for his Just So Stories, and the letters to his cousin Stanley Baldwin.

Also from the university comes the Mass Observation Archive, the chronicles of everyday life by those living it, begun in 1937, revived after a 25 year break in 1981 and still being added to.

The Keep has built-in expansion – “The only certain thing about archives,” Hughes says – with space for the current 6.5 miles of shelving to grow to ten miles, and the building is expected to last for 60 years.

“Growth has never abated,” says Christopher Whittick, the senior archivist. “There I is still old stuff out there, some of which we know the whereabouts of and it’s only a matter of time before we get it, and other stuff that pops out of the woodwork”. The Keep has no purchasing budget, but an active and generous Friends organisation which allows Whittick to haunt sale rooms and even watch eBay where he has had several important finds.

Family history research will continue to be a popular pursuit, but its nature is changing, Hughes says. Because much preliminary research can now be found online, visitors are likely to be doing different searches. “They can prepare themselves better, they can spend more time doing deeper research – not just who their grandparents were but where they lived, what the industry there was, what their education was likely to have been,” she says. “There are fewer people researching, but they are using more documents, and also using more obscure documents”.