Hi, Henry, how are you?

 

I'm very well. How are you doing?

 

I'm good, thank you. I wanted to ask you about The Building Archives, a new online platform you've launched at Elliott Wood. Could you explain, for a lay-person like me, how this works, what it is and what the inspiration for it was? 

 

Sure. It was put together by a bunch of structural engineers. At the early stages of any project, when you have an existing building on site, a structural engineer will make it a priority to try and find the archive drawings of that building. That can really help the early stages of design and help to inform how the project progresses, what you can do with this existing building and help to really realize its full potential. As structural engineers, we've been doing this on early-stage projects, and historically, it has been extremely difficult to source the location of these archive drawings. Usually, it's a young engineer that's untrained in the art of solving crimes and becoming a detective inspector for the day!

 

(laughs)

 

(laughs) You're rattling through local libraries, building control, planning portals...

 

...RIBA? Is the RIBA library involved in this too? Or is that not the same sphere at all? 

 

Yes. I mean, there are all sorts of places that store archive drawings and house a whole load of archives. So, you're using all of these different sources really, usually, to figure it out. The original name of the building is usually a good thing to try and find. And then you can go somewhere like the London Metropolitan Archives, and you can search for that building name. You might get lucky, and you might find it. Or you might do a Google search, and you might find out who the original engineers were, and you might contact them, if they still exist, and see how good their archive is. If their archive's good, you might be lucky and find those archive drawings. So really, it's come down to a history of struggle, trying to find archive drawings and realizing: wouldn't it be nice to have a centralized hub, a database, where the location of all of these archives is just listed out? We're not trying to have a centralized archive itself. We're really just trying to connect the dots between the researcher and the location of these archive drawings. At the moment, it's early days; it's two years in the making, and it started with the purchase of one archive, which was the…

 

Bylander.

 

Yes, exactly, the archives of Bylander Waddell Partnership. So, these guys were very prolific back in the 20th century, and they built tens of thousands of buildings. And it just so happened that at Elliott Wood, we were working on a couple of projects at similar stages, where we sourced the archive drawings designed by Bylander and one of our engineers went to where they were stored. They were looked after by an ex-director of Bylander called Alan. Alan looked after these other retirement projects in a small office and would sell them, as and when. Nearing retirement, he was looking to sell these on, and mentioned in passing to one of the engineers, and after discussions with those directors at Elliott Wood, as well as these two projects, we decided to purchase the entire lot with the idea that we try and publicize it a little bit better. And so, two years on, we've catalogued everything from that archive and we've launched the website to advertise the location of these archives. We've got a sort of semi-interactive map where you can search and zoom around the country and see what archives we do have, with the hope to bolster it further as the years go on. We've recently purchased another massive structural engineer consultancy's archive, a company called CNM…

 

Clarke, Nichols, Marcel, right?

 

Exactly! Yes, they've recently gone bust, and the liquidators were looking to sell the archives, and they're of a similar sort of size; again, tens of thousands of projects, hundreds of thousands of drawings. We've employed an archivist to go through those. They're actually not as well catalogued as Bylander. We've literally had to go through every single reel of microfilm to realize what we have in there. And that's what happened. We scanned in all the drawing issue registers, and we're just going through the process of uploading that information to the website…

 

…So, if I can just interrupt, there are lots of purchases going on here, and there's presumably lots of money involved in time, in terms of going through all this stuff. It's a not-for-profit platform that people will access free of charge. So, my cynical question is, what's in it for you guys? Is it just improving the industry? 

 

The platform itself is not for profit. What we haven't talked about is where we're trying to go with this website. At the moment, we sell the archive drawings, so if an interested party contacts us, there is pricing in place where, for a certain amount of drawings, you pay a certain amount of money, or you have a reduced rate, depending on if you purchase more drawings. So, it's similar to any sort of archive that you would come across. If you contact like an Arup, they have their own archives system where they sell the drawing. So, the archive drawings themselves aren't free, but the use of the platform is free. So, what we're planning to do is to open this platform up to other engineering consultancies or any other archive owners, where they can upload their data to the platform free of charge. The data is small; we're not asking people to send us the actual archives themselves. We're just asking people if they would like to, to send us a database, something as simple as a project reference and a project address. That can put a pin on a map, and you can click on the pin on the website, and it'll tell you who to contact in order to try and source those archive drawings, if that makes sense?

 

Excellent. It does. Well, congratulations on it. We're just up to time. Is there anything else my readership should know about this, or indeed, how it can go forward? How do you foresee it advancing over the coming years? 

 

What we really want to do is just make this at least another point of reference for a researcher. Effectively, when they're doing their research and they're trying to find these archive drawings, they'll go to London Metropolitan Archive, or they'll go to wherever else, building control or they might log into the building archive and see if it's there. We want to just be another, hopefully just a really good, centralized hub, a database where we make it a little bit easier for a researcher to find the archive drawings of that particular building they are looking for. And I think the more we try and welcome other archives within this centralized database, the easier it will be for a researcher to find these archives, and the more likely it is for these particular owners of the archives drawings to sell these drawings on.

 

Excellent. Thank you very much for taking us through it and good luck with this going forward.

 

Great. Thanks very much for your time.