Our conservation studio was established in 1975 within the Fitzwilliam Museum as part of the Area Museums Service for South Eastern England. During this period we worked exclusively for non-national museums throughout the S.E. Twenty years later, in April 1995, we joined the private sector and took the name Museum Conservation Services Ltd to reflect our background and ethos.
From this date we were able to work outside the S.E. and without limits on who we could work for. We rapidly added National Museums, private owners and international institutions to our client list.
April 1995 also marked our move to larger premises within the Imperial War Museum at Duxford, just outside Cambridge.
Over the years we have improved our facilities buying, and often designing, new equipment to enable us to further improve our work and extend the services we offer. In the late 1990s we started cutting all our mounts in-house. This was followed by in-house picture framing. Our most recent significant purchase was a hand-held X-ray fluorescence spectrometer – which was very useful when working with the BBC on ‘Fake or Fortune’.
Over the years we have also built up a good collection of blank sheets of historic paper to enable us to find a good match when filling losses in artworks.