Last summer, MA Conservation student Jolanta was on a placement with us, working with our collection of Estates plans – which are part of the UAL Institutional Archive.
These plans date from the early 1900s to the 1980s, and are mainly architectural plans, elevations and schematics of properties and estates that belong to five of UAL’s Colleges and their predecessors. We estimate that there are around 2,000 plans in total, which have been stored in 130 rolls.
A selection of 207 individual plans have been digitised and catalogued, you can find the records for these on our online catalogue.
The vast majority of the plans are in need of conservation treatment, having been stored in unsuitable conditions for several decades. Jolanta was helping us list these items, recording their condition and conservation requirements.
Unfortunately, there are no imminent plans to carry out active conservation work, so for the time being we are embarking on preventative conservation by repackaging the plans into archival boxes, which protects them from further damage during storage and acts as a measure against disasters such as water and fire damage.
Due to the fragility of these plans, we aren’t currently able to produce the physical items for consultation, however the digitised images can be viewed in our search room.