Saying farewell to Old Aberdeen House

As you may be aware from our social media posts and website, over the next year we will be moving out of our Old Aberdeen House site. 

The Archive has been based at the site, originally constructed between 1898 and 1901 as Old Aberdeen School, since 1986. Initially the home of the Grampian Regional Archives, the service evolved into Aberdeen City & Aberdeenshire Archives during the local government reorganization of 1996.  

Plan of Old Aberdeen House from building warrant plan, 1901

We currently share the building with St Peter's RC Primary School and the site has an exciting new future with them as the council refurbishes it into an improved home for the school. For this refurbishment to be carried out, we need to scram! 

We have long been aware of the constraints of our existing sites, both at the Town House and Old Aberdeen, and with both sites now effectively full, our ability to take in new material and fulfil our remit to preserve significant modern records from both Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire Councils has been restricted. With this in mind, the City Council bid for UK Shared Prosperity Funding to help conduct a feasibility study into options for new archive accommodation, which was awarded in early 2023. The feasibility study is underway and the report will be published in April.  We look forward to updating you with our plans for the new (or new to us) building in the future.  

In the meantime, our Old Aberdeen House collections will be moving into additional spaces in the Town House and external storage to enable us to vacate the building. As you can imagine, this is a massive project! Planning for it began in earnest during our stocktake fortnight in November 2023, when the team carried out a thorough inventory of our holdings at Old Aberdeen. We identified material that needs to be repackaged ahead of the move, as well as collections that had not been fully accessioned or might be a candidate for appraisal. We also calculated the cubic meterage of the holdings to establish how much space we will need across both the Town House and external storage company sites. We hold a massive 200m3 of records at Old Aberdeen House across the 8 storage rooms in the building! 

A well wrapped archivist checking what is on the shelves in our chilly store room during stock take

It would not be possible fit all this material into the space currently available to us at the Town House, so we will be moving higher priority collections (records that are frequently consulted and needed for Data Protection subject access requests, as well as the “gems” of Aberdeenshire’s collections) to the Town House.  

Examples of collections held at Old Aberdeen: Aberdeenshire Assessed Tax Report for Aboyne; Stonehaven harbour plan; glass plate negative of Ballater; James Sutherland bus company headed letter; Kincardineshire Constabulary wanted poster. 

Other records will go to offsite storage managed by an external supplier elsewhere in Aberdeen. It will still be possible to access these collections after the move, but we will need more notice for these retrievals.  

This brings us onto a necessary evil of the move: to carry out the work required to carefully pack and move up our one-of-a-kind collections, we will be reducing our opening hours at both sites. These will be as follows: 

1 April - 3 June: 

• Old Aberdeen House open Mondays (by appointment only) 09:30 to 16:30. 
• Town House open Fridays (by appointment only) 09:30 to 16:30 

10 June onwards: 

• Both Old Aberdeen House and Town House will be closed. 

The Town House search room is scheduled to reopen in Spring 2025 (with access to collections formerly at Old Aberdeen House at this site by prior arrangement). 

Facilitating your access to the collections is a big part of why we enjoy our jobs, so we’re sad that there’s going to be a pause in this part of our service. We’d love to hear in the comments about how you’ve used our collections for your research in the past, or what your favourite collection is? What records are you looking forward to seeing when we reopen?