For the past two weeks the curatorial trainees have been carrying on the good work of last year’s trainees by sorting through the remainder of the Cullen, Lochhead and Brown accession. Hundreds of cardboard tubes of architectural drawings produced by the firm over more than a century in practice were rescued by the collections team and brought into John Sinclair House in Edinburgh when the firm closed in 2011. (See A New Collection for RCAHMS for more on the rescue effort.)
The drawings, a valuable record of a wide range of Scottish buildings and places, were stored in containers that were no longer fit for purpose. Our main goal has been to give them safe, suitable new homes. We’ve been extracting rolls of drawings (with some difficulty!) from cardboard tubes with metal lids that are prone to rusting and replacing them in archive quality cube tubes made of acid-free cardboard.
Nora and Ruth attempt to remove a roll of drawings
To give the drawings the best protection we can, we’ve also been wrapping each roll in acid-free paper and keeping an eye out for any conservation issues (rusting paper clips, old sellotape, mould…) to flag up to our conservators, Tizzy and Emma.
Before and after
This has been an exciting task because it’s involved unrolling architectural plans that haven’t been seen for maybe 60 or 70 years! We’ve even discovered some beautiful designs from as far back as 1890 when Alexander Cullen, the practice’s founder, was working alone. The projects we uncover need to be listed so that we know what we have in our collection and can let the public know too. Listing the contents of a tube can be quite straightforward if it contains only a single project, but at times our patience has been tried when a roll of 40 drawings has had 40 different projects!
The production line in action – Jen, Nora and Joe
It’s a satisfying feeling to see the mish-mash of old dusty and rusting tubes giving way to rows of cube tubes neatly lined up on clean shelves. It makes all our hours of hard, grimy work worthwhile!
Only one shelf to go!