I have been to ... the Prince Philip Maritime Collections Centre

The Prince Philip Maritime Collections Centre is located very close to Kidbrooke mainline railway station in South East London in the middle of what was a former RAF station. The base was set up in 1917 by the Royal Flying Corps to act as a storage depot, and by 1918 it had several large warehouses that stretched over 1,000 yards alongside the railway line. It was so large that it even had its own 2-foot gauge railway network.

Between the wars the station was known as No.1 Stores Depot from March 1920 until February 1937, when it became No.1 Equipment Depot. It was renamed No.1 Maintenance Unit in April 1938 and was closed as an independent station in February 1947. During the Second World War it was further expanded to include a large barrage balloon depot, No.1 Balloon Centre, 901 Barrage Balloon Squadron, and No.2 Installation Unit, which constructed and repaired the Chain Home radar station masts.

Between 1949 and 1953 the base was the home of the Russian language school of the Joint Services School for Linguists. From the beginning of 1954 until January 1963 Kidbrooke was the location of the RAF Movements School, where personnel from all three armed services and the Civil Service were trained all aspects of cargo movements and mobility. It was also the home of No.4 Motor Transport Squadron until 1967, when the work done by the squadron was civilianised. The civilian transport unit moved to the nearby Woolwich Arsenal site in 1968/1969, at which point the base was finally closed.

Most of the site was then redeveloped into the Ferrier housing estate (which has now been rebuilt, redeveloped, and renamed Kidbrooke Village) and its associated primary and secondary schools, and only a few single-storey, brick-built storage sheds were left undemolished ... and these have now been renovated and incorporated into the Prince Philip Maritime Collections Centre.

The Prince Philip Maritime Collections Centre lies in a bend of the A2 between a housing development and one of the main railway lines from Charing Cross into Kent. It can be reached by road and by a pathway from the local railway station. The main building was built in 2017, and it is now open to the public for pre-booked tours on a regular basis. It was on one of these tours that Sue and I went on Thursday.

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On our arrival we were greeted by members of staff from the Learning Department of the Royal Museums Greenwich, who introduced themselves and gave us a quick briefing about what we were going to see. We then set off on our tour.

Our first stop was in one of the large storage buildings which houses part of the model ship collection.

As can be gathered by the following photographs, the models are being stored in special storage crates and are not kept in glass cases for public display, hence the slightly blurred images due to the material used.

From there we moved on into one of the areas where wide variety of artefacts are stored.

These included a Roman amphora that was recovered from the site of a shipwreck in the Thames Estuary that contained a large number of olive stones, all that remained of its original cargo of Spanish olives.

We then returned to the main building, where we were allowed access to part of the storage facility used for paintings.

Our next stop was in an area where some of the museum's collection of celestial and terrestrial globes are stored ...

... before we moved on to the room where part of the ceramic collection (and other artefacts, including every copy of the Lloyds Register) is kept.

The museum has the world's largest collection of commemorative Nelsonian ceramics, part of which is kept in this area.

We finished our tour of the storage part of the centre with a trip to the uniform store ... where we saw a tiny doll of a WREN in World War I uniform.

The tour then moved on to the rooms where conservation work takes place. In the first room one of the staff was preparing a sledge used by the Shackleton Expedition for display in the main museum, ...

... whilst at the other end of the room members of the horology conservation team we hard at work on some wall clocks from the Royal Observatory.

In the room where the museum's storage boxes and display stands are made ...

... one end is used by the paper conservators. Whilst we were there, they were hard at work restoring a watercolour of the Royal Observatory. This required the original backing to be removed piece by tiny piece before the painting can be washed in a special vacuum washer to clean it and to restore some moisture to the paper.

We finished our tour in the room where fabric items are restored and conserved.

It was interesting to see that one item undergoing work in that area was a dress that was originally owned by Caroline Herschel, the younger sister of astronomer William Herschel. (He was George III's Court Astronomer and the discoverer of Uranus.). She was an astronomer in her own right and was the first woman to publish scientific findings in the 'Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society', to be awarded the Royal Astronomical Society's Gold Medal, and to be made an Honorary Member of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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Our tour was scheduled to last two hours but overran by fifteen minutes because it was so interesting.

I cannot recommend a tour of the Prince Philip Maritime Centre too highly. The staff were extremely helpful, very knowledgeable, and gave freely of their time to explain what we were seeing and what they were doing. For anyone who likes watching TV programmes like 'The Repair Shop', this was an opportunity to see experts at work on historical artefacts.

For further details about the tours and other events that take place at the centre, visit their website.