About the building

HARC brings the county's archive, archaeology unit, the historic environment record, and the biological records centre together in one building, allowing people access to all these records in one place.

The HARC building opened to the public in August 2015, with the official opening taking place on 1 October 2015, by HRH The Duke of Kent KG.

Started in August 2013, the build for the Herefordshire Archive and Records Centre took just over a year - with completion on site in December 2014 and formal key handover in January 2015. You can view pictures of how the development progressed on our Flickr album.

The award winning building is energy efficient, with running costs significantly less because of the leading edge 'passivhaus design'. It now provides Herefordshire's archives with the environmental and access standards as required by The National Archives for accreditation. It also enables us to offer a range of social and community outreach programmes, with a dedicated educational room and improved facilities and access for the public.

Moving the archive and records

All the archive collections were stock-checked, cleaned, packaged and re-boxed where necessary, so they were in the best condition for the move to the new building. There were 17,500 boxes, 10,000 volumes and 5,000 maps.

About 50 volunteers assisted with the preparation programme - helping to clean and package the documents and making packaging or inputting survey details. In 2014 they gave us an amazing 15,779 hours of their time, without which the project would not have been possible.