As the designers and engineers of our conservation equipment, we often work in close collaboration with our clients and delight in making items that are truly built for purpose. Learning how and where the pieces will go on to be used gives the Willard team great satisfaction. Here, we follow the journey of 3 large Willard tables as they arrive at their new home, 140 miles away at the new Centre for Material Culture as part of The Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA), within the University of Cambridge.
The Museum is currently in the process of consolidating their 3 external storage facilities and moving everything across to a newly refurbished building: the listed Cambridge Nuclear Bunker.
The new Centre for Material Culture will provide a stable and safe environment for the objects in MAA's care as well as creating a new space where researchers, collaborators and Indigenous peoples interested in the collections can come and view cultural items.
Throughout the project, we collaborated with Dr Katherine Szabo FSA who explained a bit more about what our conservation tables will be used for and why…
“The Cowles Workroom will be the central space for such visits and our three new Willard tables are the centrepiece. All of the materials we work with are conservation grade, and the quality of Willard tables combined with the materials used, mean that they are ideal for our purposes. We have many large items: shields, masks, spears, rolls of textiles etc where a large, stable surface is needed for safe positioning and viewing. Having three Willard tables gives us the freedom to use them separately or place them end to end to create a large working area.”
“Willard have been true collaborators: communicative, constructive and responsive to our needs. We are enormously pleased with the end product and would work with Willard again at any point in the future.”
We hope you have enjoyed reading this customer story and would to thank Dr Katherine Szabo and her team for the photographs and information about how our tables will now be used.
Take a look at the conservation tables available here.