Science Museum move to Old Oak Common (on to LB of Hammersmith & Fulham freehold land, not Cargiant)

"... the government will also provide £150 million to provide new world-class museum storage facilities to replace Blythe House Olympia in London." - Chancellor George Osborne, Autumn Statement 2015

Small object storage

"The Science Museum galleries are stuffed with over 15,000 objects. However, more than 170,000 more of our objects are hidden away in Blythe House. Many of these have never been on public display.

"The massive labyrinth of storerooms at Blythe House is home to everything from beautifully crafted telescopes and early examples of operating tables to Stone Age tools and freeze-dried genetically modified animals.

"The basement and the majority of rooms on the ground floor are occupied by objects from the collections of the Wellcome Trust, which are artefacts of the history of medicine. The ground floor also houses part of our pictorial collections and then the remaining four floors hold the rest of the objects, arranged by collection.

"There are over 90 rooms in total dedicated to holding our objects, from the very small to the very large.

"Also at Blythe House is a conservation laboratory, where our conservators work across a range of objects to preserve their condition. We also have a photographic studio, where objects are photographed for our records and publications. There's also a quarantine area (where incoming objects are checked before being transferred to the main rooms) and a research room."

History

"Blythe House was originally built as the headquarters of the Post Office Savings Bank. This Government-owned bank was set up to provide a way of generating public investment and providing a way for the ordinary person to save some money.

"The large, multi-floored building was at one point home to 7,000 clerks, who worked in gender-separated areas to process savings transactions. The Blythe House address is famous from having been printed inside millions of saving account passbooks, some of which are still occasionally sent to us (we do, of course, forward them on to right people). For the past few decades, the Science Museum, British Museum, and Victoria & Albert Museum have shared the use of the building as a place to store reserve collections of small and medium sized objects."

"With the buildings blacked out to help preserve the objects, the building is now a dark and brooding space filled floor to ceiling with thousands of weird and wonderful things that most people will never see."

Big Object storage

"Our big objects are currently held at the Science Museum at Wroughton, a former Second World War airfield.

"The Wroughton site is a Second World War maintenance airfield in Wiltshire. It has been occupied by the Science Museum since the 1970s, when many of our large civil aircraft were flown into the site. The site also stores our large-scale objects which are not on display and cannot be located at Blythe House.

"Seven aircraft hangars house items from the science, engineering, transport and agricultural reserve collections. There is also a research store, built in 1993, which has a stable environment and is ideal for less robust large objects. These are working stores and, as such, are not open to the public."

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'Science Museum at Old Oak Common' visualisation