The Ballast Trust: A Brief History has now been put up on our website here. To accompany this document, I thought that some visual representations would be helpful to give people reading the history a sense of the scale of operations, the working conditions (which I'm told were always very cold) and also the state that records were found in before being rescued and sorted.

The following pictures show the working space at the former Joiners Shop in Scott Lithgow's Kingston Yard. This facility was the operational base for the Ballast Trust for over three years from 29th July 1988 to 19th March 1992.

Joiners Shop empty

Full of records

There are images of current working conditions at Walkinshaw Street on our flickr pages which are a definate improvement what with actual heating and proper offices. It is worth noting that when operations were moved to Walkinshaw Street, 22 tons of records were moved from the Joiners Shop and a second workspace at Kincaid's in Greenock.

The task of organise such huge volumes of records was made even harder by the condition that some of the collections were found in. These photographs show records from a shipyard's offices and loftspace that were eventually sorted. These are known in the profession as 'records in the wild'.