Essex: 1,000 years of Essex history is now housed

More than 1,000 years of the county's history is now housed in a building fit for the new millennium.

As the New Essex Record Office becomes a key architectural and cultural feature of 21st century Chelmsford the vision of those who set up its predecessor - in 1938 one of the earliest such archives in the whole country - has surely been triumphantly realised.

The success of Essex Record Office, until now based at County Hall - with some of its precious collections having to be distributed to other parts of the town, and even occasionally, the county - has been phenomenal, rightly gaining it a national, and international, reputation.

Now all the archives, ancient and modern, can be brought together under one, state of the art roof.

The heart of the building is surely the magnificent searchroom, with space for 120 users of manuscripts, maps, and microfilm, each in its own, dedicated, section.

A feature of this room, although light and airy, is that sunlight must never penetrate it, as irreplaceable papers are consulted.

The building has been designed to accommodate this, even to the extent of moveable "fins" on the exterior which can be adjusted to block any intruding shaft of sunlight!

From here, users can order electronically documents and records they require.

Assistant County Archivist Janet Smith explained:"Over the last five years we have been developing a computer programme designed for us, and with us.

''The public will find all our catalogues and indexes, all the information and records we have, is available on a computer database that is easily searchable, so they will be able to search very quickly for any records we have that are relevant to what they are interested in.

"That programme is going to be available in Essex schools and libraries throughout the county and later this year it will also be on the Internet."

Another impressive feature is the welcoming reception area and public suite.

This includes a bookshop, which will sell not only the popular Record Office publications, but other books on local history, and a refreshment area.

There is also a user-friendly lecture theatre seating 140, a seminar room, an exhibition area, and education rooms capable of accommodating a classful of children.

Some of the rooms are available for hire. Special accommodation for the Essex Sound Archive has also been incorporated into the design.

The central core of the record office - aptly referred to by Janet as "the keep" - is the three-storey repository for the, literally, millions of documents which form the the important and growing collection.

Atmospherically controlled, and with the most up-to-date fire prevention equipment available, this treasure-house of antiquity has five miles of shelving, with space for another 15 - 20 years' growth in archive material.

Around 60 per cent of the people who come to the record office are trying to trace their family history, and there is accommodation for the Essex Society for Family History.

Another very popular interest is seeking out the history of a house. A new purchaser of an old home may want to find out when it was built, or who lived in it in previous centuries.

Research into the history of villages and local communities is also very popular, and much use is made, of course, by university students and school pupils working on particular projects.

And, for example, people wanting to establish exact boundaries of property come to the record office for help.

As Janet Smith points out, it is not just leisure interests that take people there, but real, practical issues as well. The building is fully accessible by disabled people. Visions of boxes full of dusty documents are conjured up by the word "archives".

And, indeed, that is not infrequently how they arrive at the record office.

Often, many of them have been, if not exactly neglected, then certainly not kept in optimum conditions.

Here the work of conservators like Rosemarie Marshall and Keith Dean comes in.

In a streamlined laboratory they have access to the most modern techniques to restore manuscripts - some stretching back around 1000 years - to legibility and a state of preservation which will, hopefully, last for another 1,000 years.

Some, indeed, arrive in such a state that they have to be put in an "isolation" room, where they are cleared of moulds and insects.

The room is so hermetically sealed that not one mould spore could find its way out to attack any other rare document.

*One of the favourite aversions of conservators like Rosemarie and Keith is old-fashioned flour and water paste - much favoured by ancestors as an adhesive to mend torn papers, but a terrible job to get rid of.

Another is sticky tape, which, when removed, will leave a mark.

Archive collections are nowadays not simply stores of manuscripts, although they are, of course the key element of any historical research base at the start of this millennium.

By the start of the next, they will undoubtedly have been long overtaken by ever-more sophisticated methods of electronic and other as yet undreamed-of sources of reference material.

But, hopefully, those precious old documents will always be treated with the respect and care they receive at the hands of this county's archivists.

The oldest document in the Essex collection is an Anglo-Saxon charter dating from 962 AD and relating to a grant of land - in Devon, actually - to the Petre family, which settled in Essex in the 16th century.

From then until the present day the miles of manuscripts detail the story of a county through the tumultuous centuries.

They include parish records, family papers, diaries, letters, maps, wills, and much else, including records of businesses over the years, churches, schools, clubs and societies.

And nowadays they are joined by modern electronic records, not to mention the important Essex Sound Archive.

"Every aspect of Essex life can be studied here," said Janet Smith, Assistant County Archivist.

"A great many of the people visiting us will find themselves looking at original documents.

''But for security reasons and conservation reasons, a lot have been put in the past on micro-film and micro-fiche, and we are beginning now to digitise records.

"It is very much ancient and modern.

''We are not stuck in the past. This is a building very much looking to the future."

Converted for the new archive on 19 November 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.