Gloucester’s Store to Store community project is back!
- DATE WRITTEN:
- READING TIME: 2 minutes
- AUTHORS: Hazel O'Neill (Archives Manager)
Working with the Museum of Gloucester and with support from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, 2025’s ‘Store to Store’ re-archiving project has proved so successful, we’ve been invited to return for another season of work this year.
Last year, our dedicated team of incredible volunteers gave 4,500 hours of their time to repackage and organise 2,700 finds boxes from several important excavations in Gloucester, reducing box numbers by an impressive 43%. This freed up museum storage space and ensured the museum had an accurate record of their archive, allowing them to make it accessible to researchers.
This year, many familiar volunteering faces are back to undertake similar tasks. Finds and paper archives from significant excavations – not only in the city but also the surrounding county – are being dealt with, including the renowned Colin Renfrew’s excavations at Bourton-on-the-Water in the 1970s and 1980s. The paper archive is an excellent snapshot of the theories, methods and practices in archaeology at the time of work.
Recently, while processing finds from an excavation at Boughspring Roman Villa near Tidenham, Gloucestershire, volunteers Marta and Yusup discovered two ceramic tiles – one with a dog’s paw print, the other with a probable child’s heel print. Perhaps the child tentatively stepped onto the clay before realising their mistake and progressed no further, while the dog probably realised nothing and carried on regardless!
The Discovery Centre exhibition at the Museum of Gloucester is part of this year’s Festival of Archaeology on Saturday 18th July. Join us from 10am to 4pm to meet the volunteers as they work, see some of the material we’re archiving, and talk to our team.
You can also see the volunteers in action every Thursday, Friday and Saturday until October!
