May I put the opposing point of view to Peter Emmerson?

A national or multinational company that is built up out of the merger and
amalgamation of smaller and more local enterprises inherits archives which
are exactly like those of other businesses which stayed local and which are
traditionally placed in a County Record Office.  Whitbread's predecessor
firms were an integral part of the local economies of the areas where they
function, and Whitbread's itself was a significant part of the London
economy from the 18th century onwards.  Locating the archives of predecessor
companies in the areas to which they relate makes them available for study
alongside other records which complement them and explain their social and
economic context.  In the specific case of Whitbread, we already hold other
records from many of the predecessor companies from other sources, so the
local deposit of their records would reunite fractured archives, and I would
guess this is likely to be true elsewhere.  By contrast, where they are
gathered together in a specialist repository, they may be alongside other
records from the same industry, but this is often less significant than a
context of other records from the same area.

Whilever a company is willing to look after its own records, there are
advantages to this, but if it is no longer able or willing to do so, and the
archive can be conveniently and logically broken down into the distinct
archives of constituent parts, this seems to me a valuable and healthy
resolution of the problem.  Records relating to a firm after it becomes a
conglomerate obviously cannot be broken down in quite the same way, and it
seems logical to me for these to be kept with the records of the core
business in the area from which the core business sprang, or where its
headquarters is situated.

Local record offices justify the preservation of archives from the
communities they serve on the basis that they are of cultural value to those
communities.  Collectively, they also form a national network that is of
national cultural value.  I see no particular reason why the archives of
businesses should be treated differently to the archives of other forms of
local organisation: do they not pay business rates just as individuals pay
Council Tax?  Are their records any less worthy of preservation in the
public interest?  Furthermore, areas of the country with a concentration of
the headquarters of national or regional organisations are benefiting from
higher business rate income as a result, and it seems not unreasonable that
they should bear a proportionately greater share of the cost burden as a
result.  Certainly this was a view I was happy to live by when I was City
Archivist in Birmingham and on the 'receiving end' of the argument.
Obviously if a company is in buoyant times and simply chooses not to run an
archive, a repository which accepts its records may wish to seek support for
the costs those records bring; but that is not an argument I would apply
only to corporate depositors.

Nick Kingsley


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