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THE DECANT (AND “RECANT”!)
OF THE MIDLAND RAILWAY STUDY CENTRE

by Dave Harris, Coordinator of the Midland Railway Study Centre

Please see the the bottom of this page for the latest updates.

The home of the Midland Railway Study Centre is being transformed into the “Museum of Making at Derby Silk Mill”. What was for many years the Derby Industrial Museum, which has been largely closed to the general public since the 2008 financial crisis hit the public purse so badly, is now operated by a charitable trust. A great deal of work has been done by the new Derby Museums Trust to develop something which will attract people — not to visit once and never return (no matter how much they may have enjoyed looking at the exhibits), but to return and use — again & again & again...

This vision is materialising in the form of the Museum of Making.

The word Making has a multitude of interpretations; from how Derby was “made”, through all facets of industrial history and manufacturing, to the act of crafting things yourself from a wide range of materials. The Museum of of Making will celebrate Derby's history and the associated skills of the city, as well as offering people the chance to learn and develop skills of their own. In that context, railways are a perfect fit; intrinsic to the history of Derby and relying on a bewildering range of crafts and skills. The Midland Railway Study Centre will continue its role in assisting people learn about that history, while the famous model railway will form the perfect environment to learn or apply many skills — at least those needed to reproduce the Midland Railway of the Edwardian period in miniature. Even if ‘hands on’ isn't your thing, there will still be plenty to look at with ALL the objects from the combined collections of ourselves and Derby Museum being in “accessible storage” and so, for the first time, available for all visitors to appreciate — without appointment.

Before any of that can happen, however, nearly a century of neglect that has blighted the building needs to be reversed. When the Mill was rebuilt following the fire which literally razed it to the ground at the beginning of the 20th century, the liberal use of asbestos was intended to prevent a reoccurrence. Combined with a riverside site which present its own structural problems, and several generations of public ownership with consequent minimum investment in the fabric, this is a once in a hundred years opportunity to bring this World Heritage site back into tip-top condition. That amount of work, however, can only realistically take place with a completely empty building — and is certainly not compatible with keeping irreplaceable artefacts anywhere in the vicinity.

Thus we “Decanted” everything to a temporary site for the duration of the building works. Now it all has to go back!

The planning work to get us to this point is itself hugely impressive. Staff from Derby Museums have worked tirelessly to develop the fine detail and prepare various bids for funding. The lion's share (£9.4M) is to come from the Heritage Lottery Fund with the balance coming from the Arts Council, trusts, foundations and fund raising. Meanwhile, Bauman Lyons Architects of Leeds were appointed to develop the design for the building and see the project through, and specialists in developing inspirational visitor environments, The Creative Core of Huddersfield, are designing the look and feel of the exhibition and learning spaces.

The task to empty the building began in earnest in January 2018 and by the summer of that year we were established in the Temporary Site. While we have been in exile work has continued in order to get the collections ready to move back in during 2020.

As for our place in the Derby Silk Mill Museum of Making, the new Railway Study Centre will certainly look different. Although we will be in the same part of the building as we currently occupy, because all our objects will be redeployed elsewhere, either on display or in Accessible Storage, our footprint will contract. All we will be directly responsible for will be our own and Derby Museums's Midland Railway document & ephemera collections, providing access to them for researchers and anyone interest in learning about the social history they represent. We will continue to be volunteer led, operating by appointment, with a reading room within the Railway Study Centre constructed as a new mezzanine above our existing object store and accessed — step free — from the second floor of the Silk Mill.

Exciting and busy times ahead.

Update — Sunday, 26 January 2020

As we turn for the home straight, the metaphorical final sprint for the finish line is about to begin. Speller Metcalfe are putting the finishing touches to the fabric of the Silk Mill, and volunteers in the Museum of Making's new worksop is already busy constructing many of the fixtures & fittings for the project. For our part, we have been working closely with the architects (Bauman Lyons) and the designers (The Creative Core). The new Railways Revealed gallery on the second floor (where the model railway will be reinstalled) will have a strong Midland Railway theme and some of our most striking objects will be displayed there. The remainder of our three dimensional object collection will be contained in an area on the third floor called The Assemblage.

Our document collection will be contained within the Railway Study Centre, accessed off the second floor through the Railways Revealed gallery. The space available for the collection will be used to maximum effect thanks to a technique known as parameterising. This means that each of our storage boxes and containers have been analysed so that the shelving which will contain it has been designed for absolute efficiency.

We were able to see progress on our new space for ourselves thanks to a site visit in mid January. The following image provides a glimpse of the new mezzanine where the reading room will be located. A set of stairs and a dumb waiter for moving boxes to and from the store will occupy some of the space in the foreground.

The newly constructed mezzanine space above the Railway Study Centre storeroom whicxh will become the Reading Room.

There is another page which contains the older updates about the Decant and the transformation into the Derby Silk Mill of Making.