BRITISH LIBRARY

COLLECTION MOVE

DOCUMENTARY PORTRAITURE

In 2022, the British Library commissioned me to document a major collections move at its Boston Spa site in West Yorkshire, part of the wider redevelopment of one of the world’s largest library storage facilities.

Between April 2021 and December 2022, British Library teams moved more than 100 kilometres of collection material across the site — roughly the distance between Leeds and Liverpool — while keeping the collection available to readers throughout the process.

The move was required to create space for the next phase of the Boston Spa redevelopment. Lower-use material was transferred into the Library’s high-density automated storage system, where vast quantities of books and other collection items are stored in precisely ordered containers and retrieved by robotic cranes when requested. Higher-use material was relocated elsewhere on the site to remain more immediately accessible.

I photographed the people and processes behind the operation: collection teams checking and preparing material for transport, items being recorded and moved through the site, and the extraordinary scale of the automated storage environment itself.

What interested me most was the contrast between the physical scale of the collection and the precision of the human work required to move it safely. At its peak, the team checked and loaded around 150 metres of collection material every day, with Collection Care staff identifying and protecting vulnerable items before they were transferred.

The resulting photography documented a largely unseen piece of national infrastructure — the people, systems and spaces responsible for preserving and providing access to a significant part of the UK’s national collection.

Client: British Library
Location: Boston Spa, West Yorkshire
Project: Collection Move / Boston Spa Redevelopment
Photographer: Drew Forsyth