The whole wide world under one roof (Deemanka Jayakodi, Sri Lanka, ITP 2025)

Written by Deemanka Jayakodi, Museum Curator, Colombo National Museum (Sri Lanka, ITP 2025)

Today, we travelled to Reading to visit the British Museum’s Archaeological Research Collection facility. Like every time, I fell asleep on the way, and I automatically awakened right before our coach reached our destination. Finally, the day for archaeologists in the ITP 2025 team has become a reality! Since I would have to write the blog for the day, I noticed that lots our faces are already excited and filled with happiness like I haven’t seen before during the last 30 days of the time we have spent together.

The super warm welcoming team of the BM-ARC were waiting for us at the entrance. The very first person waiting for us at the door was Katie Godwin, Senior Collection Manager, who warmly welcomed all of us. Everybody from the BM-ARC was excited to know about our time with the ITP in UK. After collecting our passes we walked to their board room and Katie introduced us her team and explained to us what exactly the BM-ARC is, using a short and sweet presentation, the way I like most when it comes to every training.

The British Museum, The Victoria and Albert Museum and The Science Museum’s storage facilities was originally held in Blythe House, London. The Government owned the Blyth House facility was rented it out to the three institutes. When the government decided to sell the property in November 2015, the three institutes were funded with £150m to relocate to new facilities elsewhere. It took almost a decade to complete the Blythe House decant project, and here we are at the new BM-ARC.

Here, the facility houses over 3 million of the British Museum’s collection, mostly textiles, findings from archaeological excavations and archival records, human remains and various types of replicas/models/casts in a well maintained, fully environmentally controlled storage area.

The most important advantage of their facility is that anyone from any educational or research background can request a research appointment with their collections, under the supervision of their cleaver team and free of charge.

When presentation time was over we were separated into 3 groups and visited different areas of the facility before lunch time.

Fernando, Komal, Kataraina, Paint, Safoura, Hanan and I were accompanied by George and were guided towards the textiles collection with Alice.

Paint, who is a Curator at the Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles in Thailand, was super excited to explore the huge and well stored textiles collection from all over the world.  I was very surprised to see the massive storage facilities and thousands of textiles objects and equipment.

Alice was very informative about the collection and she never hesitated to show us each possible drawer and the corner of the facility. Everyone was amazed to see a textile piece from Colombia which was over 1000 years old and well kept.

After showing a bit of everything, Alice allowed us to explore the records and look at what’s in the collection from our home countries. Then time was up and we headed towards the study room.

Max was there waiting for us with different types of plastic boxes and we were curious to see what exactly was inside. Max explained everything about storing archaeological findings and was asked lots of questions by everyone in the group. Fernando from Ecuador was over moon to examine 5000 year old archaeological findings from his country and everybody was super happy to engage with the collection on the table.

Then it was time to have lunch. Everybody was outside having an international buffet from all over the world under the summer sun and Hanan brought a whole pot of Chicken Machboos for everyone.

Lastly Alana took us to the quarantine room for a session on integrated pest management and we played the game to freeze or not to freeze?

Like always, time flied, but we still had time for a final Q&A session with Samanta Stewart, Head of Collection Care and Moves.

Making sure of the security, well-being and passing down of cultural heritage is never an easy task for anyone or any institution. But, as a young museum curator who curates my country’s national archaeological collection, the BM-ARC you have made my day.