Dr Adrian Steel and Cathy Wilson (RIBA)
Many of us visited 66 Portland Place in April 2024, when the move was still spoken about in the future tense. Cathy Wilson and Adrian Steel came to tell us how it is actually going, and the room was glad of the update.
This is the first full decant of Portland Place since the RIBA moved in during 1934, with the drawings and archives now leaving the V&A as well. Rather than close and wait, the team built interim services, and the most instructive part of the talk was how they decided where to go. They surveyed users and worked with the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, and concluded that if nearly everything must stay reachable, browsing is the thing you sacrifice. A retrieval service can be built almost anywhere. Shelves that readers can walk along cannot.
From there came real constraints: cold, dry storage for photographs, space for staff to work beside uncatalogued material, and a site already equipped for readers. The result is a service split between The London Archives in Clerkenwell and a store fitted to RIBA’s own specification at Crown Fine Art in Stockwell, both on one tube line.
What the team has sustained through all of this is remarkable. Readers can still order material, and staff have kept working alongside the collections throughout. At Crown, the week is divided between cataloguing and collections care early on and booked appointments later, so processing continues rather than pausing for the duration. Integrating with The London Archives meant listing over 22,000 journal volumes so they could be ordered through the host catalogue, a considerable piece of behind the scenes work done while the move itself was underway. Journals and biographical files were prioritised because they are heavily used, and the indexes that support that research were placed on open access rather than shut away. Wilson was candid that early rules have already been relaxed in readers’ favour, and booking was deliberately kept simple, with procedures written so the work is shared across the enquiry team rather than resting on one or two people.
Conservation and digitisation have carried on as well, and sharing an office with The London Archives has brought unexpected collaborations, including a journals display during the London Festival of Architecture where every desk was taken. Their lessons for the next phase were practical and immediately usable: whole days rather than short shifts, problem areas tackled first, slack weeks built into the timetable.
The library returns to Portland Place in 2028 with more on open access, alongside a new discovery layer and plans for a consolidated collection centre. We are grateful to both speakers for sharing all this while the work is still underway, and we look forward to visiting once they are home.
Morgan Wilson, University of Notre Dame
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