Preparing for the move - a new store | Royal Museums Greenwich

Important information for visitors

Until summer 2025, there is a new visitor route at the National Maritime Museum while we carry out essential improvements to the Museum's roof. Most galleries will still be open as normal, and special exhibitions are currently free for all visitors. However, the Great Map and AHOY! will be closed for the duration of the works. Find out more.

Essential Information

Location	National Maritime Museum

17 Feb 2009

The start date for the move of material out of our onsite store is rapidly getting closer (Monday 2 March). Whilst Archive, Library, and Documentation staff have been beavering away in the store preparing for this, other museum departments, together with contractors, have been putting a lot of work into preparing the new offsite store. As you know, all material currently stored onsite is being moved offsite to allow work to begin on the Sammy Ofer Wing. The site chosen is already owned by the Museum but needed some alterations to make it work for the 3000 or so shelves of material it needs to contain for the next three years.

The store originally had a lobby and several small rooms inside it.

These had to be demolished to create one large open space. The floor was then recovered and the lurid yellow walls repainted in calming magnolia.

Meanwhile, the contractors chosen to provide the new racking puzzled over how best to fit in as many bays of shelves as possible and which way round to run them. The solution was to have lots of shorter runs across the store but this then had an impact on the lighting, which ran lengthways down the long narrow space. So our electricians came in and changed all the lights round, also making sure that they would be above the aisles and not the bays of shelving. Just in itself this is such an improvement to the existing store where we sometimes have to get torches out to see what we are doing.

The IT Department have also been involved, installing a new and faster data link from the main museum site, more telephones and a wireless network. We are going to be working on the collections there a lot over the next few years so this is of great benefit. A small office-cum-workroom has also been redecorated and fitted out for us.

The contractors have spent a few weeks building the new racking and have finished ahead of schedule.

Some final cleaning is taking place after which various colleagues will be onsite labelling the new bays so we will be able to track and document exactly where material is placed once moved and unpacked.

Hannah (Archive and Manuscripts Manager)