Discovering our Museum Depot: The Acton Access Project

Acton Access is a major new project for London Transport Museum, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. It exists to help us make better use of the Museum Depot in Acton, which is our main collections storage facility. Anything that isn’t on display at the Museum in Covent Garden is at the Depot, so it is full of trains, buses, signs, ticket machines, uniforms, models, toys and much more.

In fact, it’s a bit too full – we could make more efficient use of the space, and this project will help with that. We have also found that, despite it being open for tours plus three open events every year, the Depot isn’t as well known as we’d like it to be. We want to change that.

The Curatorial team is greatly invested in Acton Access, as is our Learning team. Learning have been working with local partners to engage with new audiences and communities to provide training courses that enable skills sharing and will lead in some cases to paid placements with Transport for London. The content of the training courses is informed by the curatorial work at the Depot.

At the Depot we have 270 pallets of collection material stored on racking. The racking is packed floor to ceiling with a range of London transport-related objects. Most of the contents of the pallets relate to signalling equipment, signage and vehicle spares, but there is some infrastructure from Underground stations too. Some of the material is accessioned, which means it is officially part of the Museum’s collection. Some of it is classed as backlog, meaning it was brought to the Museum with the intention of it being accessioned but is yet to be processed. The remainder of the material is, tantalisingly, unknown.

It’s exciting, isn’t it?

An initial survey of the contents of the racking had been done in the past, but what we really needed was for someone to go through absolutely everything, object by object, to conduct a thorough audit. Acton Access has allowed us to do just that, since we have been able to hire a dedicated Project Curator – Becky Luffman.

Becky’s job is one of the most enviable on the project. She gets to go through the pallets and see every single object up-close. Each one needs to be measured, photographed and described on a new spreadsheet. With everything inventoried, we will be able to decide what we might want to accession, what might be useful for vehicle restoration projects, and what we might want to offer to other transport museums to enhance their collections. It’s a big job, but Becky isn’t working alone.

The help of volunteers has been crucial. We have been able to draw on the expertise of existing volunteers who work with the vehicles at the Depot or are knowledgeable about signalling. Teams of volunteers, and members of staff from Curatorial, have been working with Becky to go through the material to properly document it. Documentation is extremely important to museum work, and we are being as thorough as we possibly can.

We have also recruited a new team of volunteers to research the objects that have been inventoried before decisions can be taken on how best to make use of them. So, we have people with knowledge and expertise to help us identify things, but also to find out more about them: what the objects’ original functions were, how they were used, who used them and so on. But still, there are going to be some objects that are tricky to identify. There are going to be some stories that we don’t already know. And this is where you come in. Yes, that’s right – we need your help.

Mysteries of the Depot is our Acton Access social media campaign. We are going to be posting images of objects from the racking on various social media platforms and inviting you to guess what they are and tell us what you know about them. If you have any interesting insights or stories about the mystery objects we show, then we want to know about it! Mysteries of the Depot will be starting soon – it’s your chance to get involved, and a great way to see what is happening with Acton Access.

This is just Phase 1 of Acton Access. It’s part of a ten year plan that will transform the Depot into a locally loved cultural partner, community resource and destination by 2032, with more space for collections and more opportunities to engage visitors with them. Stay tuned!