Creating an environment for conservation the Surrey history centre

The opportunities offered by National Lottery Funding has focused attention in recent years upon the poor conditions in which much of our written history has to be stored. The documentary record of each county is held in a record office and pressures on local authority spending have meant that often only basic and sometimes inadequate provision for the safe keeping of the documents has been made. This paper discusses the environmental conditions for the long term preservation of documents, primarily within archive repositories, and illustrates how they were achieved in the new Surrey History Centre at Woking.