The Hold Archives
Ipswich, Suffolk
In addition to providing an efficient home for the County Archives, our scheme The Hold plays an important role in the ongoing regeneration of Ipswich’s historic waterfront area– healing a hitherto raw and ragged edge to the conservation area and at the same time introducing a vibrant, important cultural destination to the town and the county.
Archives are not familiar or much-frequented buildings for most members of the public and a challenging aspect of the brief for this project was to produce a welcoming building, enabling and positively encouraging the public to engage with Suffolk’s rich archival heritage in stimulating, innovative ways.
This requirement, together with the setting of the site between historic waterfront and town centre, led to the adoption of the arcade as an appropriate building typology: an extension of the public realm of streets and passages that thread through the town and an opportunity to lift the humble corridor into a memorable and attractive celebration route. By presenting the building as a route as well as a destination, the public is naturally drawn through and past the building’s facilities – the arcade or ‘nave’ providing an intuitive wayfinding device that at the same time increases the length of ‘shop window’ available to the curators along which to present a stimulating array of displays.
From the Fore Street entrance visitors arrive into a light, generous entrance foyer - the setting for café, shop, learning space and exhibition room -, before passing between the Search Room – a lofty, top-lit, library-like space -, the raked auditorium and the seminar rooms, to arrive at the New Street entrance via the garden court - a quieter contemplative space and a counterpoint to the activity and bustle of the interiors. Away from the public areas, the private areas of the building contain staff areas and state-of the-art facilities for the preservation and recording of current and new archive material
Longevity, low maintenance and the adjacent proximity of a conservation area suggested brick as an appropriate material for the building envelope: horizontal banding in Suffolk white bricks confer a distinct identity, a visual reading of the way the long elevations cut into the four-metre fall across the site, and a subliminal reference to the shelves and lines of text contained within. The long elevations are further articulated by expressing the different volumes and spaces within and a reversal of the banding around the auditorium.
The historic waterfront area with its warehouses, maltings and masts has a varied and characteristic skyline, and The Hold establishes its presence by contributing to it with two distinctive, zinc-clad roofs that signal the volumes of the Search Room and the Strong Rooms within them.
The Strong Rooms have been designed with input from the National Conservation Service and in line with BS EN 16893 and BS 4971 - best current practice for managing archive and library collections. Environmental conditions within the Strong Rooms are delivered by adopting a passive approach that harks back to the pre-air conditioning days when documents tended to be stored in dark, thermally massive spaces with relatively stable environmental conditions. This provision is reproduced at The Hold by an airtight ‘box within a box’ configuration with no heat or humidity sources other than the archivists themselves.
Awards
Civic Trust Award 2021 - Regional finalist
Consultants
Exhibition Design: GuM Studio
Landscape: Plincke Landscape Limited
Structural Engineering: Atom Consultants
Public Services Engineering: SVM Consulting Engineers
Fire Safety: Bureau Veritas
Acoustics: Clarke Saunders Associates