Echo Archive: organisation in progress

Terry, Malcolm, Paul's wife and David, May 2020

M Brown

May 2020; garage left hand side storage in Phase Two

M Brown

Garage right hand side after phase two completed May 2020

M Brown

Vera in front of her garage-archive May 2020

M Brown

Echo archive in third phase before initial filing April 2024

T Barclay / D Hurrell

Third phase: office environment after initial filing April 2024

T Barclay / D Hurrell

The archive in various phases and in successive locations.

25th May 2020   Malcolm Brown reported on the second phase move:

Today, Nick, David and Terry and I successfully rehoused the Echo Archive negatives collection. Estimates of the number of negatives vary from 2 million to 3 million and these are stored in in 24 metal cabinets and over 200 wooden trays. Thanks to the kindness of Vera Knapton, they are have been transferred to her garage from Rayleigh Museum’s storage unit at Safestore on Progress Road.

I don’t think this would have happened without the terrific input of Mike Davies’ son, Paul, who owns a van, and his wife,  who transported some of the wooden trays in her car. Mike Davies was at Safestore and brought the negatives down from the top-floor storage unit on a trolley and helped load them in the van.

The log books which identify the jobs to which the negatives relate will be located in Studio 13 for safekeeping rather than Vera’s garage. We do not have all the log books yet because some are in the hands of Rayleigh Museum researchers.

Vera was pleased with how tidy it all looked. I was pleased that we were able to stack all the wooden trays on top of the metal cabinets though the stacks are a bit higher than I would have liked.
We will need to discuss in due course how we might process the negatives.

In 2024, the third phase move relocated the negative archive to a secure, temperature controlled office.