A warehouse on a Letchworth industrial estate has been identified as the £2.5m solution to North Herts Museum's storage woes. The council is set to purchase Unit 1 at City Business Park in Letchworth to provide a home for more than one million artefacts held by the museum.

Most objects are currently kept in storage at a site on Hitchin's Burymead Road, but there is little space left and the ageing building has led to concerns that items are at risk. Options for solving the situation were considered last year, and a cabinet meeting yesterday (Tuesday, 18 March) agreed to go ahead with plans to purchase the Letchworth warehouse unit.

Cllr Tamsin Thomas, executive member for the arts, said the City Park unit would "offer unique advantages. It's a 25-year-old open plan warehouse with office space located in the main commercial area of Letchworth Garden City. Facilities of this size and type do not come on the market often."

But she said "significant investment" would be needed to kit the unit out to best preserve the museum's collection. Council officers put the cost of purchasing the warehouse and fitting it out for museum storage at £2.5m.

The warehouse has been advertised for sale at £1.25m and is currently let to Citysprint (UK) Ltd until January 2026 at a cost of £64,000 per year. If the council's purchase goes ahead as planned, it will receive that rent from the end of March 2025 until January 2026.

It is available to buy on a "long leasehold" until 2150, with a peppercorn rent. Terms have been agreed for the purchase and were considered by councillors in a behind-closed-doors session. 

Cllr Thomas said the offer made by the council for the unit is "significantly below" the £4m allocated for a museum storage solution, and added that if the plans proceed as expected the council could "potentially release equity from the Burymead site".

Ros Allwood, head of the museum service, said the warehouse "will solve all our storage problems". She continued: "You've been to Burymead, you've seen the state of it.

"We're looking after the heritage of the district and it's going to give us such a wonderful opportunity to not only have the right environmental conditions, which we just don't have at the moment, but also to allow for more community engagement. 

"In the old days, nobody really went to museum stores apart from curators. But now we want to open them up to let everybody enjoy our heritage and the joy of unit one is that there will be room for school groups, community groups, for us to give talks there. It has so much potential and it's a really fantastic solution."

Cllr Thomas said: "It's a building on an industrial estate, but what we're going to put on it is incredible heritage – from chalk streams, Roman bones, natural history collections, phenomenal documentary records of military service, of our planning departments, of local news, that the public do use and is incredibly important.

"I'm really excited at the potential for grants to support the move, to really bring the community in and to look after these resources which need looking after and make sure they're used by academics, community groups, all sorts of things.

"The collection goes back over 250 years and I'm just thrilled that our generation is upholding what past generations gave us, and that our future generations will get to benefit from it."