A Newcastle-under-Lyme storage manufacturer has won a contract
worth £100,000 with the Alfred Gillett Trust, Somerset. This
contract will fit out the newly built archive and museum store of
the Trust, which looks after the extensive heritage collections
associated with C & J Clark Ltd and the Clarks
family.
Founded in 1825, Clarks is known today as the UK's best-selling
shoe business, with nearly 500 UK shoe shops, an annual turnover of
nearly 50m pairs of shoes sold globally and with 13,000+ employees
worldwide.
The Trust is currently coming to the end of an exciting
construction project to build an environmentally sustainable
archive and museum store, and to renovate a grade II listed
building to provide public access to the Trust's heritage
collections.
These include many thousands of pairs of shoes, of which some
are on permanent display in the Shoe Museum at Street, Somerset.
Much of the historic shoe collection is made up of shoes designed
and made by Clarks, but other shoes of interest are also kept,
including those from the medieval period and back to Roman
times.
The Trust is also responsible for the extensive business and
family archives, including photographs, films, ledgers,
correspondence, advertising and audio-visual collections, as well
as artworks, fossils and Quaker costume.
The fitting out of the new archive and museum store by Rackline
will complete the construction project and will be followed by the
relocation of the collections to their new home during 2012. The
improved accommodation will enable the Trust to continue to widen
access to their unique collections, which are already used heavily
by employees of the firm and by academics, students and local
residents.
The Rackline installation has been specifically designed to meet
the specialist needs of the Trust. Profile shelving will be mounted
onto a multitrak system which operates on wheels, providing
flexible mobile shelving and able to hold loads of up to 15 tonnes.
The installation will be completed by the end of January 2012.
Rackline, established in 1984, designs and manufacturers
innovative storage solutions to meet the storage requirements of
archives, museums, universities and hospitals, as well as legal and
accountancy firms and large retailers. Current clients include
Marks and Spencer, the National History Museum, Great Ormond Street
and the University of Reading.