When St Edmundsbury Borough Council put the storage requirements for its West Stow Anglo Saxon Village out to tender, one aspect of the enquiry stood out in particular – the building in which the storage equipment was to be installed didn’t exist! All the potential suppliers had to work with was a set of architectural CAD drawings and a list of requirements.

“We put this challenge to several storage companies,” said Alan Baxter, Heritage Manager for St Edmundsbury, “but it soon became clear that the company most comfortable with working this way was System Store Solutions. Right from the outset, the company was very convincing in its grasp of our requirements, and it was able to put forward very attractive suggestions about how those requirements could be satisfied.”

After a competitive tendering process, System Store Solutions was selected as the vendor for the project and, from that point on, the company worked in close conjunction with Alan Baxter to fine tune the design of the storage systems as work on the building progressed.

It wasn’t all plain sailing. At one stage, for example, it was discovered that essential ductwork within the building would impinge on space that had been expected to be available for storage.

“System Store Solutions took this and all of the other last-minute modifications completely in its stride,” said Alan Baxter. “In every case, the company agreed with us the best way the changes could be accommodated without impacting the capacity or convenience of the storage systems, and then simply got on with the job. We couldn’t have wished for more flexibility.”

The completed storage project, which forms an essential and integral part of the education facility that operates alongside West Stow Anglo Saxon Village incorporates an exceptionally wide range of storage products. These include open FST shelving for general heavy item storage, pigeonhole shelving for fine art works and wall-hung mesh panels for difficult longer items and large lighter items such as penny-farthing bicycles. Also supplied are mobile shelving storage for long-case clocks and large art works, cantilever racking for the display area, large wall-hung mesh panels for social history items and long-span shelving for loading bay general storage.

“System Store Solutions not only had every product we needed to ensure the best and most convenient storage for our very diverse range of artefacts,” said Alan Baxter, “the company was also prepared to share its expertise with us to make sure that we got the very best from those products.”