West Suffolk House in Bury St Edmunds to be the new home of Suffolk Regiment Museum’s archives following closure of Raingate Street record office

A military museum is ‘thrilled’ its archives, which include those of national importance, will be able to remain in Bury St Edmunds.

On Monday, around 250 boxes of records belonging to the Suffolk Regiment Museum will be moved to their new home at West Suffolk House, in Western Way.

The vast majority of the museum’s archives were kept at the Suffolk Archives branch in Raingate Street, in the town, but this facility closed in the summer as part of sweeping budget cuts by Suffolk County Council.

Following talks this year, Suffolk Regiment Museum, which has its home at Gibraltar Barracks, in Newmarket Road, has secured storage and a room at West Suffolk House, which is jointly owned by West Suffolk Council and the county council.

Lieutenant colonel Tony Slater, of the Suffolk Regiment Museum, said the archives, which contain thousands of documents, included one of the biggest collections of World War One regimental records in the country, which he said were of ‘national importance’.

Of securing the space at West Suffolk House, he said: “We are absolutely thrilled the whole thing has come to success. It’s happened in actually a relatively short period of time.”

He praised both the district and county council, particularly staff at West Suffolk House for their ‘can-do attitude’ that’s made the project possible.

Lt Col Slater, honorary secretary and one of the trustees of the museum, said when the regiment first loaned the records to the record office one of the stipulations was that they should never leave Bury St Edmunds.

He added that there are some additional records at the Suffolk Regiment Museum and these will also be placed in West Suffolk House ‘so that will bring this all together’.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday Bury St Edmunds Town Council awarded a grant of £12,860 to the museum to support setting up the ‘new archive space for both local visitors and tourists’.

Lt Col Slater explained it would cost just over £24,000 to set up the archives at West Suffolk House and another £20,000 a year to run it, adding the museum is also funding a ‘great deal’ of the project.

Financially the project was ‘quite challenging’ for the museum, he said, ‘which is why we are very grateful to the town council’.

Speaking at the meeting, Lt Col Slater said: “We have on loan to these archives [Suffolk Archives] all our regimental records and amongst them the First World War records are about the third largest in the country of a [infantry] regiment.”

“So they are exceedingly important, certainly to us, I also believe important to Bury St Edmunds and Suffolk as a whole.

“We have done everything we can to hold these records here in Bury St Edmunds and not lose them to Ipswich.”

The grant application said many visitors to Suffolk Regiment Museum combined a visit to the museum with a visit to the archives to research a family member or conduct other research.

“They often travel from afar and stay in Bury St Edmunds overnight, thereby increasing revenue for the local economy of the town,” it said.

The application added that the new archive space would be ‘a modern facility for all ages to learn, enjoy and understand this unique part of local history’.

Speaking to SuffolkNews, Lt Col Slater said one of the archivists from the now-closed record office in Raingate Street would work on a part-time basis to look after their archives and open them to the public, with a number of volunteers also helping.

The aim is for the facility at West Suffolk House to be open to the public in April 2025.