Z1169

Business Records of The Inskip Partnership, formally E H C Inskip & Son, architects and surveyors

1903 - 1998

From: 1903 To: 1998

The date range covered is c1904-c1992 but the majority are from the 1930s to the early 1970s. The Inskips practice appears to have been centred mostly on Bedford and the vast majority of projects were for business or residential property around the town. The two major projects being the Harpur Trust and the County Hospital, which continued as contracts for many years. Outside Bedford projects cover a wide area in North and Mid Beds. Projects beyond this area and beyond Bedfordshire appear to have often depended on the client e.g. working for several breweries - Newland & Nash, Wells & Winch, Simpsons, Paine, they were required to work on public houses in South Beds, Huntingdonshire, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire. The involvement with a swimming pool in Thirsk, North Yorkshire and shops in King's Lynn and Reading are less easily explained. One particular project was Higham Bury for Mr Simpson. This large house was one of the biggest undertaken by Inskips and the owner was a personal friend of the architect. Drawings for this project survived in greater number than for other projects including both stone and joinery details, which were rarely found among other projects. Although it is a-typical of the work of the practice more drawings for this project have been retained due to its importance. The collection contains: a number of housing schemes for Bedford RDC, a few photographs of completed buildings and a detailed survey of Harrold Mansion undertaken by H T Inskip as part of his training in 1955. After appraisal has been completed it is acknowledged that the selected drawings will not give an accurate impression of the work of the practice because of the lack of plans for both their biggest contract, Harpur Trust, and the small jobs of minor extensions and alterations, proposed bathrooms, proposed garages etc which were the bread and butter business of the firm. For this reason a small number of reference and day books have also been retained for the information they give of the day to day running of the company. There is also a series of ledgers from 1904 to the 1930s which detail work done and amount charged. These ledgers were given to the record office by Mrs Inskip in 2001 but have been united with the material from the company for the context that they give.

When the Inskip architectural practice moved from 29 Goldington Road to 49? Goldington Road most of the pre 1930 architectural drawings were left behind in the attics. It is not known why some early plans were transferred to the new premises but it seems likely that it was coincidental depending on whether they were rolled in with later drawings. In March 2004 the partnership was again planning to move to new premises and called in the Bedfordshire & Luton Archives Service to assess whether the architectural drawings then stored in two rooms on the top floor of their premises would be of interest to the archives service. Some early records received from the widow of Henry T Inskip in 2001.

The majority of the drawings were stored in numbered rolls but no index to the numbers survived. The bundles did not appear to have been disturbed for some years. Some rolls contained drawings for a particular property or, more usually, a particular client e.g. Wells and Winch. Many were 'multi' rolls containing any number of projects that varied not only in client and type of building but also in date. It was therefore decided not to retain any reference to the original bundle numbers but to re-arrange the drawings selected for preservation by geographical location of the property.

Appraisal criteria The bulk of the material made appraisal unavoidable. The first appraisal was carried out on site over three and a half weeks and involved five record office staff. Duplicates and rough sketches were removed and the following criteria applied to the remainder. 1. Informational value - drawings of minor alterations were not kept unless they provided full plans of the entire building - small buildings such as garages, shed etc were not retained - steelwork, stone and joinery details were only kept when they gave significant information about internal dcor etc. 2. Condition - some drawings were considered uneconomic to retain due to the amount of conservation that would be required to stabilise them. From the 1960s onwards the practice had used self adhesive labels applied to the tracing paper to give the name of the practice etc. The adhesive on most of these had migrated causing drawings to stick together. Drawings in this condition and those which were very badly torn or decayed were kept only when the information they contained was considered exceptional. Whenever possible the best preserved and/or most durable copy was retained this meant that in some cases the tracing linen or dyeline copy was kept in place of the original tracing paper. 3. Uniqueness - The Bedford Borough planning application files already held by the archive service provide good coverage for the Bedford area whereas there is no other source of material for mid Beds, therefore some drawings for mid-Bedfordshire were retained that would not have been had they been for property in Bedford. - Inskips acted as architect/surveyor for the Harpur Trust. This contract produced huge quantities of drawings for most, if not all, of the trust's buildings in Bedfordshire including all the schools and their attached boarding houses. Since the buildings belonging to the schools have been well documented in a number of publications it was felt that the drawings added little to knowledge of them or the trust and therefore only a few were selected, usually because they showed a layout at a particular point in time or because they indicated a particularly large expansion/alteration to the premises. Once back at the Record Office the drawings were given a second appraisal and sorted into alphabetical parish sequence, which enabled drawings for one project to be matched up from different bundles and duplicates identified and destroyed. Drawings were then bundled and rolled. The bundles were kept as large as possible for conservation reasons even though this makes finding a particular drawing more difficult. Out county material was collected together by county and transferred to the relevant county record office.

fonds

Inskip, E.H.C. & Son,
Inskip Partnership

architects, Inskip Partnership, E.H.C. & Son Inskip