London Metropolitan Archives - Strategic Management

London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) is a public research centre which specialises in the history of London and Londoners, caring for and providing access to the historical archives of businesses, schools, hospitals, charities and all manner of other organisations from the London area. With over 100km of books, maps, photographs, films and documents dating back to 1067 in our strong rooms, we're proud to provide access to the memory of London one of the finest city archives in the world

Exterior of the London Metropolitan Archives building

Creating a bespoke Sustainability Policy for London Metropolitan Archives.

Key objectives:

To include and encompass the City of London overarching sustainability objectives and goals.
To update and modernise the policy so that it reflects the needs of the service and our community today.
To provide bespoke guidance for a heritage service that has a sustainability focus but still adheres to archival standards and Archives Services Accreditation.
To provide clear goals, objectives, forward planning and community outlooks as well as resources that staff can access for more information.
To inspire and engage staff across all teams with sustainable practices and encourage sustainable thinking in everyday operations.

London Metropolitan Archives falls under the remit of the City of London Corporation. The City Corporation implements its own sustainability policies that feed down to all of the organisations within its umbrella. Some of these policies are challenging for a heritage institution, such as: “zero single use plastic” and “Net Zero by 2027”. A lot of our materials are shipped in single use plastics to keep conservation materials stable in transit and buildings management systems need to be run to maintain the store climate. Our policy needed to include these goals but in a way that allowed us to still adhere to collections care standards. To do this we included examples of where we are attempting to adhere to these goals to the best of our abilities such as re-using plastic packaging, recycling, and implementing passive controls. We have been transparent as to why these goals can be challenging for a heritage institution to achieve. We make clear that we are constantly researching new options and challenging ourselves to find ways to safely adhere to City’s wider goals. We aim to marry the City policies with the needs of LMA.

In the past there has been some resistance from staff to implementing wide sustainability policies for a variety of reasons including cost, time allotment and storage space for donations. To counter this, we set up the Green Group, an internal group of staff champions from across the organisation who wanted to make change but who understood the wider concerns. The creation of the Green Group has been fundamental in helping us to get staff engaged with sustainability. A newsletter is rolled out once a month to all staff to keep sustainability at the forefront of our work. On site and City Corporation news is presented alongside world news to provide context for how our actions impact on the global stage.

When Green Group attempted to roll out new initiatives like wide recycling schemes and donation schemes the key to success for a lot of these proposals was ease of access for staff. By making it easy for people to drop off donations / materials and access recycling points encourages people to get involved. Removing barriers has been key. This does require Green Group members to put in more time to find homes for donations / places to store them / organise drop offs and collections but by doing this the number of materials we have been able to salvage from commercial waste has been huge. With staff seeing the benefits of recycling and donating to the wider community uptake in sustainable engagement has been huge and staff now ask for advice and guidance before throwing away waste. With this support for sustainability and Green Group we have been able to write ambitious goals, and outlooks into our policy that are supported across LMA.

Green plastic storage box with a sign saying 'donations box' — Donations Box

Now that the policy is in place we have the opportunity to develop it even further and reach for higher goals. We hope that the policy will inspire staff to come forward with new ideas and initiatives that we can implement and therefore expand on our sustainable initiative.

We hope to be able to work collaboratively with other institutions to be able to improve on our policy but also provide advice and guidance if we have already tested out an idea on site.

We hope that having the policy in place may open doors for funding and support for development and movement towards sustainable energy sources. We would like to be able to look to upgrading equipment to more energy saving units.

The main outcome of this project is that sustainable practice is now formal policy, specifically for LMA. We have something formal to guide decision making across site and a set of standards to adhere to which will hopefully provide a legacy for sustainable practice and also provide a springboard for future development.

We have included a “Goals” section into our policy so that all staff can see where we are aiming for in the future and what their efforts are feeding into. We aim to implement these during the two-year review period of the policy. These are reviewed within our green group and reported on to our peer community. Our goals are wide ranging and include everything from easy wins such as: “reusing cotton tying tape” and “stop using Perspex stands” to more complex aims like: “consult about solar panels” and “explore sustainable exhibition production”. We encourage staff to send feedback and ideas to the Green Group and these ideas can then be fed into our goals section so that the policy becomes a group, office collective where we are all moving towards a shared bigger picture together. Hopefully all staff feel able to contribute towards our sustainable goals and make new opportunities for their teams. We would like to make these goals a reality. By opening these doors and achieving these goals we can create a more sustainable archive and provide some tried and tested methods of sustainable practice to other institutions.