Removals specialists, Bishop’s Move, rise to the challenge and prove they handle with care!
25th November 2010
When Dundee City Council’s Leisure and Communities Department was faced with the challenging task of moving the main body of Dundee’s revered collection of art and culture at the MCManus, the award winning, gothic revival style museum in Dundee, they contacted the UK’s largest privately removal company, Bishop’s Move.
Funded by Dundee City Council, the Heritage Lottery Fund, the European Union and Historic Scotland, with additional contributions from The McManus Fundraising Appeal, the aim of the extensive refurbishment was to bring the 143 year old building up to date in order to greatly improve the visitor experience, accessibility and general functionality. This exciting programme, was to include a new south entrance off newly pedestrianised Meadowside, a new retail area and café, new gallery space and a new top lit atrium alongside repair and restoration work.
Bishop’s Move were only too delighted to assist and with over 150 years experience behind them, they were confident they could live up to the challenge.
Commencing in January 2009, Bishop’s Move undertook the daunting task of moving the entire collection for a 4 week period from its temporary home in Camperdown House, Camperdown Park, Dundee to a custom fitted out repository within the city with 24 hour security, customised state of the art mobile racking, restoration and conservation facilities.
In the Autumn, we returned to move the selected collections over 3 weeks from the storage facility to the new refurbished galleries complete with their state of the art displays and interactives.
David Bruce, Bishop’s Move ‘s General Manager for Scotland, reported on the next and final stages of the move in January and early February of this year, hanging the displays in the newly refurbished gallery.
‘We have latterly transferred from this new facility the catalogued items for the opening showing, and have had our specialist team working for the last four weeks hanging artwork including ‘King Crispin’s Parade’, a twenty metre frieze in the Lower Gallery’ This had to be put up in several lengths before the restorers set to work. We also handled treasured works of art such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s, ‘Dante’s Dream’, hung in pride of place in the upstairs gallery’. This work involved accurately measuring and marking out the walls, cutting and affixing ‘J’ rail fixings to the back of the frames and onto the walls and then physically lifting artwork up and hanging.‘
Bishop’s Move ensured they had the best ‘ specialist’ team they could provide which included amongst them, Graham Burnett, their Edinburgh Foreman with over 27 years service within Bishops Move, Andy Williams, their Glasgow Foreman, with over 7 years service and his father, Hugh Williams, with 6 years service.
Joe Sage, at Dundee City Council commented on the work carried out by Bishop’s Move:
‘We were all very impressed with Graham, Andy, Hugh and Darren and there ability to rise to the occasion. We knew they have a natural understanding for handling paintings, which is why I was keen to involve them in this more difficult and exacting operation that was a new departure for them. Indeed, this was not a standard hang for us either, so there was a lot of learning to do on all sides. They are a friendly but professional lot who work very well together and with the staff here. We certainly would not have achieved hanging the number of paintings we did in the time we did without them. They certainly proved some of my more sceptical colleagues wrong and we were all sorry to see them leave at the end of the project.’
Following on from the Museum’s Grand Opening on Valentine’s Day , the McManus will be open for Public Access from 12:30 pm on Sunday, the 28th February 2010.
For further information on the McManus, Dundee ‘s Art Gallery and Museum, please visit www.mcmanus.co.uk or contact:
The MCManus: Dundee’s Art Gallery and Museum
Albert Square, Meadowside
Dundee DD1 1DA
Scotland
Tel: 01382 307200
Email: themcmanus@dundeecity.gov.uk
