Explosive stuff

An extraordinary visit to the main stores of the National Film & Television Archive in Warwickshire, not normally accessible to the public.

Miles from anywhere, the stores consist of a series of small and strangely-shaped sheds -- this group was built in the late 1970s:

But that's not all -- scattered around the large site are strange, concrete bunkers, like this:

And the clue to these things is provided by the aerial photograph. The archive site is just to the middle of the centre-line, half-way down the photo, in the middle of the inverted triangle of roads:

At the bottom right you can see part of a military runway. The archive site was the epicentre of Britain's nuclear deterrent in the post-War period, before submarines, when bombs would be delivered by aircraft. The archive is on the site of a former nuclear bomb factory.

In that context, I was rather taken with the architecture of the 1990s stores:

Clad in gabion baskets (giant mesh boxes filled with stones), these look as if they mean business.

Gabions, incidentally, have largely replaced the sandbag as a military anti-blast device.

The grouping of stone-protected stores has a purposeful air about them. Which is in sharp contrast to the most recent addition to the site -- these rather unlovely (and temporary) refrigeration containers:

It's particularly appropriate that the archives generally use military-grade building techniques because the stuff they're storing is this -- cellulose nitrate film.

Unstable, highly flammable and liable to spontaneous combustion, when this stuff burns it is almost impossible to extinguish -- it provides its own oxygen as part of the burning process, producing an intense and uncontrollable flame that will engulf anything in the vicinity.

After years of shameful underfunding by Government, a massive new master store is about to be built on this site, to contain all the masters from the national film archive (itself probably the single most important film archive anywhere) in near-perfect conditions. It should be completed and operational by the end of next year.

The new building won't disturb the bunkers of the nuclear bomb factory, which will remain preserved as a fascinating relic of military-industrial archaeology.

Oh, and sorry for the particularly lousy quality of my photos -- there was torrential rain throughout my visit, which rather interfered with everything.