Inside the Archive #44: Heritage Open Day reflections part one

On Sunday 21 September, we welcomed over 300 visitors to the BFI National Archive’s John Paul Getty Jr Conservation Centre in Berkhamsted as part of Heritage Open Days, the UK’s largest festival of history and culture. As we continue to celebrate the Archive’s 90th year, Heritage Open Day presents a unique opportunity to welcome members of the public inside the archive, and to showcase and celebrate the BFI’s collections, and the skills and knowledge of those who work to preserve them.

This year’s edition was bigger than ever and included a BSL (British Sign Language) interpreted tour; talks from our curators and BFI Reuben Library librarians; displays from our Screencraft Collections, Video Preservation, Film Lab, and BFI Replay teams; film handling activities; tours of our Film Vault; and much more!

New for this year, visitors were also given the chance to test their detective skills with our Collections Development team and get a first look at some newly commissioned short films, featuring archive material, in the Our Screen Heritage screening tent.

It was another fantastic year, and we’d like to thank all the BFI teams who contributed to making it such a success – as well as all the visitors who joined us on the day – for their enthusiasm, support and excellent questions!

Read on for more insight into Heritage Open Day 2025 from our fantastic teams.

– Ella Ferguson (Heritage Programmes Coordinator) and Adam Dixon (Collections Operations Coordinator)

New for Heritage Open Day 2025, this year we invited the public into an Our Screen Heritage dedicated screening tent that was perched on the green in front of the Conservation Centre.

Throughout the day, audiences could catch a curated selection of films including clips from our Inside the Archive YouTube series and discover more about how we maintain and bring to life the UK’s screen heritage.

It was great to test out this new space and see how some of our own moving image work lands with the public – watch this space!

– Molly Petter (Outreach and Engagement Coordinator)

We took several tour groups inside the Conservation Centre’s film vault. This temperature-controlled space is home to some of the BFI’s viewing print collection and holds a variety of film gauges including 35mm, 16mm and 8mm.

It was a total pleasure to introduce a diverse range of age groups to some of our film collection and discuss why preserving physical film is vital to keeping film history alive and for the future of the medium.

There were some great questions including “How do you know where everything is?” (barcoding system) to “What is the oldest film you hold?” (The Derby from 1895) to “What happens if the picker breaks down on the top shelf?” (you must abseil!).

– Jo Molyneux (Archive Access Researcher)

The videotape exhibit grows larger every year, this time the expansion involved three interactive Teletext displays. The concept of Teletext had to be explained to our younger guests, which made us all feel old! Everyone enjoyed playing Bamboozle and looking up the price of a holiday in 1999.

We also hosted a British Sign Language tour in the morning, which was a real pleasure – one of our goals for next year is to learn a few phrases in BSL.

All of our guests, which included many former and current industry experts and technicians, were fascinated by our display of obsolete machinery and videotape formats. They weren’t fooled at all by our trick question: “When did we at the archive stop using tape?” The answer is: we still do, in the form of Linear Tape-Open (LTO) cartridges, the destination of all our preservation files.

Last but not least, we had a visit from an illustrious actress whose CV includes Hartnell-era Dr Who. A big thank you to all colleagues in TV Ops, Curatorial and Collections Access that contributed to the display, with a very special thanks to Andy Sargeant and the Archive Technology team for helping us get the equipment set up and working in such a short space of time.

– Saul Carbonaro (Video Preservation Specialist)

Following on from a very successful show and tell at this year’s BFI Film on Film Festival, the film laboratory was represented – for the first time – at this year’s edition of Heritage Open Day.

Visitors enjoyed demonstrations of the Archives 60-year-old model C printer and talks on film processing, which illustrated how the lab duplicates the Archive’s collections.

It was a privilege to share how film travels from camera to screen, the challenges of duplicating reels that can be 100 years old, and how lasers are used to record digital files to film. We shed some light on the science behind silver halides, developer and fixer and revealed where the real magic happens.

Tune in next year, for the developing story of the lab at Heritage Open Day.

– Chris Stenner (Film Laboratory Lead)

Visitors to Screencraft were welcomed with a display of archival material which showcased the many roles and processes required in filmmaking.

Following an overview of the varied types of material we hold here in Screencraft, as well as a brief outline about our research service, we kicked off our nine tours with Alan Parker’s finance pitch for Bugsy Malone (1976). We aimed for the talks to have something for everyone and seeing Parker’s first sketch of a splurge gun and unsuspecting custard pie victim got us off to a good start. Other well-received items on display included Derek Jarman’s captivating workbook for Jubilee (1978), a set model from Love Actually (2003) and the script for an unrealised Lawrence of Arabia project. The latter was shown alongside the related BBFC report and gives a series of clues as to why the film wasn’t made.

Visitors enjoyed seeing material from the Indian songbooks collections with Jesse explaining what they reveal about cinema-going in India and how they’re currently being catalogued. One visitor was delighted to see an invitation (in the shape of a football shirt) to a special screening held in her home city of Hong Kong for Bend It Like Beckham (2002) from the Gurinder Chadha Collection, as she’d also seen the film there at the time of release. From our designs collection, visitors were captivated by an Ivor Beddoes’ storyboard for The Haunting (1963), as well as Edith Head’s costume design for Grace Kelly in To Catch A Thief (1955).

A popular object was Lotte Reiniger’s puppet from The Grasshopper and the Ant (1954). Visitors were fascinated by Reiniger’s attention to detail and equally Jesse’s description of how Reiniger pioneered the use of the multi plane camera in silhouette animation, often working at her kitchen table and using household materials to construct her creations.

Although many visitors may not have heard of Wendy Toye, some took (literal) note of On the Twelfth Day, a charming 1955 film about an increasingly exasperated Edwardian lady receiving gifts from her suitor, inspired by the well known Christmas song. Toye’s workbook contains script, notes, correspondence, continuity sheets, and sketches. Although very different to Jarman’s workbook, it’s just as valuable to researchers seeking to understand a filmmaker’s process.

We finished with Ann Skinner’s continuity script for Star Wars (1977), an item which often invokes awe in many viewers. Key to its inclusion was to highlight the significance of the script supervisor, a role which is integral from pre-production through to post. With it’s countless notes in different colours, as well as quickly drawn sketches and stuck-in polaroids, the continuity script evolves throughout a production, with the script supervisor acting as the director’s memory as well as the editor’s on-set representative.

– Sarah Law (Screencraft Coordinator) and Jesse Woodd (Screencraft Archives Assistant)

The Inside the Archive blog is supported by the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.