Buried Treasure

THESE are just some of the thousands of hidden treasures tucked away out of sight in York, which could see the light of day if a proposed new £20m open-access museum store gets the go ahead.

They are just a tiny fraction of the items housed in a single one of the Castle Museum's three stores around the city.

Gathering dust in as many as 20 other stores elsewhere, sometimes not even fully catalogued, are a wealth of other objects - everything from dinosaur bones to Roman and Viking artefacts to ancient manuscripts - belonging to organisations such as the city council, the National Railway Museum, the York Archaeological Trust, English Heritage and York Minster.

Many of those stores are full to bursting - and in some the conditions in which items are being kept are far from ideal, leading to a real risk of deterioration.

That is why a joint plan is being worked on by a partnership of museums and heritage organisations in the city for a new, purpose-built, atmosphere-controlled building in York - a state-of-the-art storeroom that would, effectively, become a museum itself. A bid for government funding is to be submitted by the end of the month.

In any museum, what's on display is only the tip of the iceberg. Most museums operate a rotation system to allow more of their material to be displayed - but even so, much never sees the light of day.

Many of the objects held in the city's various museum stores - everything from theatre bills to railway tickets to unidentified stones which contain traces of fossils - probably don't need to be on permanent display.

But each has its own story and for scholars, local historians or even schoolchildren working on a project, being able to get access to some of this material could be priceless.

Under the proposals being drawn up, anybody could visit the new store, ask to see an object, and spend time studying it. Artefacts would also be catalogued on the Internet, giving York's collection a worldwide audience. Keith Matthews, acting curator of the Castle Museum, says the new £20m store would enable museum staff to fulfil their two main tasks - ensuring material could be stored safely in such a way that it would not deteriorate, and making sure it was accessible to ordinary people.

"Accessibility has to be part of our job," he said. "How can we justify spending so much looking after this stuff if nobody is going to get the benefit?"

The few objects from the Castle Museum store pictured here give some flavour of the sheer richness and variety of the treasures that are hidden away behind closed doors.

They paint a picture of people in days gone by - from the house-proud upper-middle-class Victorian family who had the latest willow-pattern toilet bowl installed in their new-fangled bathroom, to the Seventies parents whose children were so taken with the cop series Kojak they had to rush out to buy the board game.

In case you're surprised by something as modern as the Kojak game being kept by a museum, Keith Matthews points out that objects don't necessarily have to be old to be of interest.

Each offers an insight into its own particular time, and it's the responsibility of a museum to keep adding to its collection so that there will be mementoes of the present day for future generations too.

"Time doesn't stop," Keith said. "When Dr Kirk made his street the Castle Museum's famous Victorian street, Kirkgate in 1938 it was a recreation of 1898, which was only 40 years earlier. The people going around were looking at a 40-year-old piece of nostalgia. If we did the same today, it would have to be a 60s street."

With storerooms in the city full to bursting, the danger is museum staff will have to start turning away much new material. One final benefit of the new museum store should be to ensure that reminders of York today can be preserved for future generations.

Updated: 09:05 Saturday, September 15, 2001