Making space for Jersey’s history

Friday 26 January 2018

Work on a £3.5m extension to Jersey Archive will begin on Monday in a bid to stop the home of island history running out of space by 2019.

The Archive – a repository for materials varying from parish and company documents to wills, church and criminal registers – currently stores more than 750 cubic metres of records, and that figure continues to rise.

Pressure has mounted on the centre since the Freedom of Information Law’s introduction, with more States records than ever being passed to Jersey Heritage to be archived. Paper-based materials might be declining, but at current collection rates, Jersey Archive has little over a year left until becoming completely full up 

In 2016 alone, 28 cubic metres of public records and 3 cubic metres of private materials were handed to the Archive.

Pictured: Contracts from the 1400s, one of many exhibits housed in Jersey's Archive.

A new extension, which will start being constructed on Monday, aims to remedy this by nearly doubling the building’s capacity and enabling it to keep collecting records for another 25 years.

The new strongroom block will provide around 588 cubic metres of extra storage, as well as a dedicated server room for digital records.

“Archives are a unique and irreplaceable record, telling the stories of the people, places and development of Jersey. The Jersey Archive holds more than 600 years of recorded history and this extension will allow us to continue to collect the official, community and personal records of the Island for many years to come,” Archives and Collections Director Linda Romeril commented.

Creating the extension will take around 21 months and require specialist construction techniques. Part of this will include a six to nine-month ‘drying-out period’ to ensure that the building is moisture-free and in the best possible condition to house the island’s records by its opening in 2020. 

Pictured: A criminal record held within the Archive - in this case, a lady who stole a number of military shirts.

The extension has been designed by the same architects behind the original building, which occupies the former Clarence Court housing estate site – award-winning BDK Architects and Metropolitan Workshop. 

Construction will be carried out by AC Mauger, who gained the contract following a tender process, and managed by Jersey Property Holdings, the States’ property arm. 

Welcoming the project, Deputy Murray Norton, the Assistant Minister responsible for Culture, commented: “Records management is a statutory responsibility for good reason – these documents provide material for future historians to interpret how we lived, loved and died, and they show the important legal and financial decisions our society made in the course of that journey. 

“Creating more space at Jersey Archive is desperately needed if we are to tell our Island story effectively to future generations.”