- I got several emails
to set up today's video. So the first part is: there is a massive archive hidden in a working salt mine
in the north of England. And the second part is:
it's not just for documents. Because there's so much space available, it's also an archive for actual
physical objects, for "stuff". Now it's very rare that
someone who is not an employee or an archive client
is allowed down here, particularly to make a video. Because there are public records,
important government archives, and a lot of things that
I'm not allowed to go near, let alone film. Confidentiality is important, and someone is looking
over my camera op's shoulder to check where that lens is pointing. We are 150 metres underground and about a kilometre into
that mine... is DeepStore. Ready when you are! - The area that the mine occupies
is around 3.5km east to west, and about 2.5km north to south. And at the moment we're about
1.5km away from the mining activities. We use what's called a
"room and pillar" mining technique. We don't just extract great
big massive voids of salt. There are massive pillars of salt, of which I'm actually
stood next to one now, which make the mine so stable
and support the roof. So where DeepStore comes in is: we actually build inbetween
these pillars, and in-between these
pillars is what we call the repositories,
or the rooms. And then we plane the floors,
they're painted, we install the racking,
we install the air conditioning. Originally, the mining started
around about 1850 and it really got going around
the turn of the century, 1900. Since then, it's simply
grown and grown and grown up to the present day
where now we're extracting around a million tonnes each year. DeepStore was set up in the 1990s because we've got the
perfect atmosphere down here to store items. The salt creates a naturally
occurring dry atmosphere. And of course with the racking, nothing naturally comes
into contact with the salt. Because this is relatively a shallow mine, we're around 150 metres,
400-500 feet, and because of the salt bed, it has created this natural ambient
temperature of 14-15° along with a relative
humidity of 53-55%, which anybody in the archive
and storage world knows, naturally occurring,
that is absolutely fantastic. What we've been able to do is actually
enhance these conditions and modify them even more
to client requirements. So by the use of air conditioning
and air filtration, we can make the atmosphere in here
to really whatever a client requires. The atmosphere in these storage rooms is actually clearer than
it is on the surface. - It's almost impossible to get across the sheer scale of the mine
and the archive on camera. And out there, where it's
still a working mine, I can taste salt in the air,
there's clouds of it that lands on you. But in here, things are a
little bit more controlled. It is public knowledge that somewhere in the
many, many vaults here, there are files from the
British National Archives and core samples drilled out
for soil tests during the construction of Crossrail. Other than that, well,
DeepStore aren't saying. More through wanting to be
cautious about revealing details of their clients, rather than any strict
secrecy. But the folks who actually got
in touch and invited me here have a very different reason for storing actual physical
things long-term. - Laura Ashley is a UK interiors lifestyle
and fashion brand. Within the cabinets in this room,
there are hand drawn artworks, some of them hundreds of years old that have been developed
into wallpapers or fabrics. But we also have fabrics,
dresses, rolls of wallpaper, metres of the fabric that we've produced
over the years stored in the archive. It's a continually growing
archive for Laura Ashley. It's really important for us to archive
the original physical pieces. So we can really understand, it's those techniques of
how they were made. If you scanned that, if you
created a digital archive, you would lose that history to that piece. When you can touch and feel and see some of these
amazing antique documents, you can really see the
brushstrokes in the artwork or how they were printed initially. And it might be that we
actually want to recreate how they were printed,
not just how they look. - We can't keep everything. It would be nice if entropy didn't exist, but until humanity fixes that, preservation and archiving will
take skill, time, and money. And the more you preserve,
the more upkeep it takes. Perhaps the most important decision
any archivist has to make is what to keep and
what to throw away. - So we've got almost a
hundred thousand items in this Laura Ashley archive, but that is by no means everything
that was ever manufactured. We will always keep masters so wallpaper and fabric is
core to what Laura Ashley is. Original artworks would
never be thrown away. The Laura Ashley pieces in this archive date back
to the really early period. So people may donate pieces
to the Laura Ashley archive, that could be a Laura Ashley bowl that you used to have in
your house in the 1980s or your mum's wedding
dress from the 1970s. It's fantastic for us to
be able to see that we're following in the footsteps
of the people who came before us. - We've got over three and a half million of items under storage, be it
a box or be it an artefact. We have more than 40 rooms of the same standard
or even better standard than what I'm actually standing in now. This is probably one of the largest
single repositories in the country. Currently, we occupy 14 to 15% of the actual mined void area underground, which means we've got amazing
amounts of space to expand into. I mean, really, if you were
to convert this entire site, eventually you'd probably be able to store just about every single
archive box in Europe.
